"I'm going now," he said, quietly. "But I got one more thing to say. Don't fool that boy!"
She looked up.
"Don't fool him," the man repeated. "You'll lose him if you do."
"Not fool him? It's so easy, Jim!"
"Ah, Millie," he said, with a hopeless gesture, "you're blind. You don't know your own child. You're blind—you're just blind!"
"What you mean, Jim?" she demanded.
"You don't know what he loves you for."
"What does he love me for?"
The man was at the door. "Because," he answered, turning, "you're his mother!"
It was not yet nine o'clock. The boy would still be in the church. She must not yet set out for the park. So she lighted the lamp. For a time she posed and grimaced before the mirror. When she was perfect in the part, she sat in the rocking-chair at the broad window, there to rehearse the deceptions it was in her mind to practice. But while she watched the threatening shadows gather, the lights on the river flash into life and go drifting aimlessly away, her mind strayed from this purpose, her willful heart throbbed with sweeter feeling—his childish voice, the depths of his eyes, the grateful weight of his head upon her bosom. Why had he loved her? Because she was his mother! A forgotten perception returned to illuminate her way—a perception, never before reduced to formal terms, that her virtue, her motherly tenderness, were infinitely more appealing to him than the sum of her other attractions.