"I'll love you, ma," the boy declared, tenderly. "You don't have to cry because there's no one to love you, not while I'm around."
The new life in her eyes was as much of incredulity as of joy. "Don't say that, dearie, if you don't mean it. You don't have to love me just because I'm trying to be a mother to you, and look after your clothes."
"But, ma, I want to. I do."
They gazed at each other, she with the cutter in her hand, he with the cup. What he saw was not a feeble, slatternly woman, but some one who wanted him. He had not been wanted by anyone since the night when his mudda—he still used the word in his deep silences—had gone away with the wardress who looked like a Fate. In the five intervening years he had suffered less from unkindness than from being shut out of hearts. Here was a heart that had need of him, so that he had need of it. The type of heart didn't matter. If it made any difference it was only that where there was weakness the appeal to him was the greater. With this poor thing he would have something on which to spend his treasure.
"You'll see, ma! I'll bring in the water for you, and split the kindlings, and get up in the morning and light the fire, and milk the cow, and everything."
Straight and sturdy, he looked at her with the level gaze of eyes that seemed the calmer and more competent because they were hidden so far beneath his bushy, horizontal eyebrows. The uniform tan from working in the sun heightened his air of manliness. Even the earth on his clothes, and a smudge of it across his forehead where a dirty hand had been put up to push back his crisp ashen hair, hinted at his capacity to share in the world's work. To the helpless woman whose prop had failed her, the coming of this young strength to her aid was little short of a miracle.
In the struggle between tears and laughter she was almost hysterical. "Oh, you darling boy!" she was beginning, advancing to clasp him in her arms. But with old, old memories in his heart he dreaded the paroxysm of affection.
"All right, ma!" he laughed, dodging her and slipping out. "I've got to beat it, or fath—" he stumbled on the word because he found it difficult to use—"or father will wonder where I am." But once in the yard, he called back consolingly, though keeping to the practical, "Don't you bother about Geraldine. I'll go round by the pasture and drive her home as I come back from work. I'll milk her, too."
"God bless you, dearie!"