Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/171

Rh horse. The business about the last horse was very bad, and they came and took Jim.

The old man went on grubbing round a stump, as if he was done with all things in this world now except the getting out of that stump. But the old woman (they were neither old in years) lay down on the rough bed—in her clothes, this time—and turned her face to the split-slab wall, which was lined with scrim and pasted over with old newspapers.

She turned from the wall for Andy, and for no one else.

"D—don't take it like that, Mrs. Mathews," said Andy. "Yer know—yer know ye're like a mother t' me."Then, with a burst: "An' yer might 'a' bin—an' I might 'a' bin yer son all right if I'd bin a different kinder cove."

She sat up and put both hands on his shoulders, and looked at him for a space.

"Andy," she said, "was it Helen?"

"Yes," said Andy.

"Poor Andy!" she said. "But, Andy; you are my son the only son I've got now." Then, with a sudden and fearful change of expression that scared Andy: "Andy, you'd do anything for me, wouldn't you?—poor Nelly's heart-broken mother?"

"I'd do anything for you, Mrs. Mathews. I'd do anything for you that I'd do for—for Nelly."

"And for Jim, for our sakes—mine and poor dead Nelly's?"

"Y—yes, Mrs. Mathews."

"Then you are my son, just as much as if Nelly had lived and you had married her."