“The boy in the hospital liked it because he had no mother, either, except to dream of.
“It was too beautiful to last. When he was almost well and his arm was out of the sling, the little girl’s father came to talk business with him. Splendid plans for that boy her father had, but they failed abruptly. He refused to consider them, even. He refused everything except the cost of his coat and shoes, and the amount of money that was in the coat. He was an orphan and on his way to school, he said, and was obliged to have that much. He was gentle and quiet about it all, and finally the girl’s father said: ‘You are an American, all right! I like your independence. Good for you!’ And to the day of his death, he loved and admired and talked about that boy. But he never saw him again.”
“He must have been worth knowing—that father. Did they ever learn the boy’s name?”
“No. The little girl’s father would not let anybody try. Said he was probably the descendant of some proud old cotton king down South and would turn up some day, either very bad or very good—they always did. A reporter had taken a snapshot of him as he sat on the hospital cot, but her father took his camera from him by force and gave him fifty dollars in place of it. The little girl has the picture yet.”
“But if they had published the picture?”
“Oh, you didn’t know her father. He said it would be a violation of honor as between gentlemen. No, he had begun life a friendless boy himself, and he understood.”
“A beautifully told story. Tell me of the little girl who was saved.”
“There is the romance. The boy promised to come back when he became famous—”
“Ah!”
“But he has probably forgotten her, in his own struggles. She was nothing to him, after all; only a little girl child he had pulled out of the water. But she—well, as the years passed, he grew to be almost a god, in her memory. You see there were the old papers to read over, and the little picture, and the song he had given her. And there was the telling of it all, over and over, at school. Her romance became a living thing, an immortal thing.”