Chapter 1 - Page 2

nurse. But I was
prepared even for this, and raising my hat I pointed with my
staff to a clock in the distance. She should have been
overwhelmed, but as I walked on listening intently, I thought
with displeasure that I heard her laughing.

Her laugh is very like David's, whom I could punch all day in
order to hear him laugh. I dare say she put this laugh into him.
She has been putting qualities into David, altering him, turning
him forever on a lathe since the day she first knew him, and
indeed long before, and all so deftly that he is still called a
child of nature. When you release David's hand he is immediately
lost like an arrow from the bow. No sooner do you cast eyes on
him than you are thinking of birds. It is difficult to believe
that he walks to the Kensington Gardens; he always seems to have
alighted there: and were I to scatter crumbs I opine he would
come and peck. This is not what he set out to be; it is all the
doing of that timid-looking lady who affects to be greatly
surprised by it. He strikes a hundred gallant poses in a day;
when he tumbles, which is often, he comes to the ground like a
Greek god; so Mary A---- has willed it. But how she suffers that
he may achieve! I have seen him climbing a tree while she stood
beneath in unutterable anguish; she had to let him climb, for
boys must be brave, but I am sure that, as she watched him, she
fell from every branch.

David admires her prodigiously; he thinks her so good that she
will be able to get him into heaven, however naughty he is.
Otherwise he would trespass less light-heartedly. Perhaps she
has discovered this; for, as I learn from him, she warned him
lately that she is not such a dear as he thinks her.

"I am very sure of it," I replied.

"Is she such a dear as you think her?" he asked me.

"Heaven help her," I said, "if she be not dearer than that."

Heaven help all mothers if they be not really dears, for their
boy will certainly know it in that strange short hour of the day
when every mother stands revealed before her little son. That
dread hour ticks between six and seven; when children go to bed
later the revelation has ceased to come. He is lapt in for the
night now and lies quietly there, madam, with great, mysterious
eyes fixed upon his mother. He is summing up your day. Nothing
in the revelations that kept you together and yet apart in play
time can save you now; you two are of no age, no experience of
life separates you; it is the boy's hour, and you have come up
for judgment. "Have I done well to-day, my son?" You have got
to say it, and nothing may you hide from him; he knows all. How
like your voice has grown to his, but more