Archie had been standing at the door, watching her progress around his room with eyes that were almost incredulous. His room!—and she in it!... He felt that if he opened a window she might flutter out again, back into the world from which she came. Once, when he was very small, he had found a belated autumn butterfly in the street, and brought it home, and put it on a geranium-plant he had in the window, hoping it might like to spend the winter there. But in the morning it lay dead against the pane. Archie remembered that butterfly now, and shivered. She saw him.
She ensconced herself in the largest and shabbiest of his three chairs and patted the arm of it invitingly. "Come over here, and let's really talk!" she commanded.
He obeyed. "What shall we talk about?"
"Tell me about your mother," said Joan.
He told her what he could remember. It was not much except a voice—a soft English voice; and the feeling of arms that held him close; and quite clearly the sound of sobbing beside his pillow whenever he woke suddenly at night.
"Nothing was ever heard from her after she left you here?"
"Oh, yes. Money came once or twice to the landlady for my board—this was a boarding-house, then. But after a few months it stopped coming."
"And haven't you any idea what became of her?"
"She died, of course," said Archie simply. "Or she'd have come back for me. There were people who thought—" he swallowed hard—"that she left me here on purpose, and never meant to come back. That isn't so. I don't know much about her, but I do know that she loved her child. You, can't fool a kid about that!... And there were people who thought she killed herself. But I don't somehow believe she was a quitter. What do you think?"
He had taken a photograph out of his pocket, and handed it to Joan, who studied it closely. Despite the unbecoming "fringe" and jersey of an earlier day, it was a lovely face she saw, without a hint of folly or weakness or worse. The chin was firm as Archie's, the features strong as they were delicate. The face was still rounded and soft with youth, yet out of it looked a pair of haunted eyes.