"David," she said, more serious than was usual with her, "if you had one I should want him to look like you.... Here, little boy, here, in your face I see your father."
The woman had moulded her cool hands to David's smooth, soft cheeks, and was looking wistfully into the eyes of her little boy. But abruptly he struggled free from her; he slipped to the floor, mounted on a chair in front of the chiffonier and peeped excitedly into the mirror. A long time he looked at the tousle-headed reflection that looked earnestly back at him. He frowned, and the boy in the glass frowned, too. He was a great disappointment, that boy; he wasn't the teeniest bit like any father that ever was. He was only a child in a white nighty.
David faced about; he got down off the chair, and he turned his accusing eyes upon Mother. She had fooled her little boy; she had told him a wrong story, and it was woful disillusionment.
"You cannot see him, David," she said, "because you have no picture of him in your heart."
Well, then, did Mother have such a picture? If she did, why could she not show him that picture? And please, Mother, where did she keep that heart where the picture was?
Yes, to be sure, she had such a picture, but it was not of David's father; it was of someone else, for she had never seen David's father. In her heart was still another picture: it was a memory which had to do with the sad nativity of her little boy. So sad an event it was that she had left off being a head nurse at the hospital, in order to become a mother by proxy.
David might some day come to know that there was a fogyish, bachelor doctor who was almost a father in the same sort of way—almost, but not quite, for the child had been left not to him, but to her. A home, likewise, was her inheritance, a very pretty little home and all else that had once belonged to the real mother of the little boy.
A brave death she had died, that kinless widow at the hospital. And how could it have been otherwise, when so large a faith was hers in the nurse whose arm had gone lovingly around her, and whose voice, many and many a time, had given comfort and had known finally how to smooth the way to death?
But it was the Doctor's hand, not the hand of the nurse, that had gently closed the mother's eyes upon her last long sleep; and it was he, not the nurse, who had turned wofully away, and stared and stared and stared out of the window.
Grave pictures were these that Mother kept in her heart, and David was not to know how much he troubled her when he fell to questioning; and that is why, in the midst of his endless inquiries, he was wont to encounter the Great Never Mind.