claring that she alone was David's mother, Miss Eastman
was called away to the telephone. It was Dr. Redfield inquiring
anxiously about the little boy. Pulse normal, temperature normal,
no symptoms of any sort, she told the physician, but she could
scarcely control her voice to answer his questions. There was a
tightness in her throat, and she spoke with crisp brevity,
instead of detailing anything of what had passed between her and
David.

When she had hung up the receiver and gone back to the child, she
took him in her lap and tried to entertain him with a book of
"Mother Goose" jingles, turning the pages slowly and concealing
her emotion under the silliness of the nursery rhymes. In the
midst of her comical recital about Jack and Jill who went up the
hill, she suddenly exclaimed:

"What great fun it was to be with Doctor!"

No matter how much she might try to divert her little boy, he was
only indifferently amused; but presently he remembered something
which, for the time being, caused him to forget the broken and
pilfered miniature.

"Mother," he exulted, "Mother, I got 'em! They have pockets--deep
pockets. You don't hardly know me, do you?"

David began strutting up and down the room; he stood still, with
legs wide apart, and then dug his fists deep into his pockets.

Of course mother was astounded. It required only a little
make-believe on her part to indicate that this was some strange
boy whom she had never seen before. The surprising change in him
had impressed her so disagreeably that she had been in no mood to
speak of it. Even as she had taken off the wide-brimmed sailor
hat, when David reached the house in Dr. Redfield's arms, she had
made no comment on the close-cropped, flaxen head. She had of
course remarked each detail of the little boy's altered
appearance, but what she had seen even more clearly was the look
in the man's face when he had told her that her little boy was
not well. It was this that she had seen at a glance, and it was
this that she had taken deeply to heart, but now she diligently
tried to enter into the spirit of trouvers.

All of a sudden the earnest look in David's face was swept away
by a smile. His little legs began to dance; his hands danced, and
his piping laughter danced best of all. Making a prancing dash
for Mother's skirts, he demanded that she smell the good, barber
smell of his hair. But she laughed such a queer laugh, as she
gathered him up in her arms, that the