She was smiling on him quietly as she said, in a subdued voice: “You wish what, Jason?”
Realizing the immeasurable distance between them, he found himself unable to say what it was that he wished, so he temporized: “I wish,” he said, “that everything in this world was different.”
Mahala knew that he, too, had been stripped of even the little that he had; that he had lost his mother. She wholly misunderstood.
She asked sympathetically: “Do you never hear anything concerning your mother, Jason?” and this, more than anything else, brought him to quick realization of the distance between them.
Slowly he shook his head.
At last he said: “She never in all her life acted toward me as I have seen other mothers act toward their boys, and since she went away and left me without a word as she did, I am beginning to believe that she was not my real mother.”
When his own ears heard this shameful admission from his lips, he was overwhelmed. He wheeled and hurried from the house precipitately. Mahala followed a step or two to the door and stood looking after him thoughtfully. Then she heard her mother calling and hurried to attend to her wants.
CHAPTER XIII
“Only Three Words”
As the weeks went by and Mahala settled down to real work, she found that she had not boasted in vain. She was capable of doing as much work in a day as any other woman. She was capable of doing tasteful work, becoming to her customers to such a degree, that no one else in the town ever had even approached. With Jemima’s help she was slowly beginning the foundation of a sum of savings that meant for them a better home in the future; and then one day she was called to the office of Albert Rich and told that in the settlement of her father’s estate he had found a small, abandoned farm, with a ramshackle house standing upon it, wholly unencumbered. He had kept this find a secret until Martin Moreland had filed his last claim and taken over property sufficient to discharge all indebtedness, at a very low appraisement.