Towsley didn’t nap at all. He lay wide-eyed and full of thought, staring at the white ceiling overhead, and occasionally touching a pansy which nurse Brady had laid beside him on his pillow. As he fondled and looked at the flower, more and more it gradually began to assume the face and features of a delicate little old lady whom he knew. It was a white pansy, with faint lavender patches on its lateral and lower petals; dashed, like all its kind, by little touches of darker hue. Yes, it was a face—Miss Lucy’s face. Those two white upper leaves were her snowy curls under her every-day lace cap. The eyes, the keen, whimsical little mouth—all were there; and the newsboy looked and remembered—till the eyes seemed to gather tears and the pursed-up mouth to tremble like a child’s—like Sarah Jane’s, when she had been denied a share in her brothers’ games.
Had there been tears in Miss Lucy’s eyes, last night, behind those gleaming glasses? Had it been out of love, after all, that she had given him her dead nephew’s pretty garments and her dead nephew’s aristocratic name?
It was all very puzzling, and Towsley felt unequal to solving the riddle, although it was he who always was first among the fellows to find the answers to the printed riddles on the children’s page of the weekly Express. He shut his eyes a moment, to see things a little better, and after the ceiling and the pansy were thus put out of sight he did begin to understand quite clearly.
Tears? He hated them. There should never any be shed for him, that he could prevent. On that point he made up his mind, and he shut his lids down tighter, so that nothing should alter his sudden resolution.
What was that sound?
Towsley’s eyes opened with a snap. He was sure that they had not been closed a second, but the nurse laughed when he so declared; he always afterward believed that some sort of magic had been used to change things about in that little hospital bedroom.
For there on the tiny dresser was lightly tossed a rich fur robe that looked as if it had just slipped off somebody’s slender shoulders. It was an old-fashioned robe, Towsley saw that, and the bonnet which had fallen to the floor beside it was quite out of style, also.
“Regular old timer, ain’t it! And she’s an old timer, too, but—the tears! Shucks! He wished nobody would ever cry. He hated tears!” again thought Towsley. And then he stole his hand around the neck of the little old lady who was kneeling beside his cot, and remarked, generously:
“Oh! I say, Miss Lucy, please don’t. It’s all right. I didn’t behave very—very gentlemanly, I guess, but if you like I’m willing to try it over again. I’ll be your little boy if you want me, and if I have to be ‘Lionel,’ just make it Towsley, too, can’t you?”
“Oh! you darling! I didn’t know that it could be possible; that in so short a time a stranger child could creep so closely into my affection. I’ve been hearing such a lot about you, from Molly, you know. Oh! my dear, I am so thankful that you did not perish. So thankful that my eyes have been opened to see how lonely and selfish a life I’ve led. Just to think, to think, that I have at last a dear little human boy to love and to love me! All day I’ve thought about you and seemed to feel that it was Lionel, our own Lionel, who had wandered out into the storm to suffer so; and—and——”