Page:The Redemption of Anthony (1911).djvu/58

 "I thought so."

"No one ever dared to ask me that before," he added.

"Perhaps no one ever guessed," she said.

"Your mother knows," Drake confessed.

"Oh, mother—she knows everything. Isn't she wonderful?"

"She's the most wonderful woman I know."

"I'm so glad you think so, too. You see I've never had any one to talk to before about mother—any one who would understand, I mean."

He nodded.

"I don't know why I chatter along this way to you."

"I like it," he said simply. "Your mother has played the most important part in my life of any one who has ever come into it."

"Has she? How?"

"I can't tell you—but she came and hauled me up out of the mire and made a man of me."