“That’s an apple log,” he said. “It burns the prettiest of any wood.”

We were very close.

He was suddenly impelled to speak of things he had not spoken of before, nor had I cared to ask him.

“You look a little bit like my mother,” he said. “Especially in the dark, by the fire.”

“But you were only four, Jerry, when you came here. You have remembered how she looked, all these years?”

“My mother lives in Mannville,” he said.

For a moment, finding that he had a mother shocked me as greatly as anything in my life has ever done, and I did not know why it disturbed me. Then I understood my distress. I was filled with a passionate resentment that any woman should go away and leave her son. A fresh anger added itself. A son like this one— The orphanage was a wholesome place, the executives were kind, good people, the food was more than adequate, the boys were healthy, a ragged shirt was no hardship, nor the doing of clean labor. Granted, perhaps, that the boy felt no lack, what blood fed the bowels of a woman who did not yearn over this child’s lean body that had come in parturition out of her own? At four he would have looked the same as now. Nothing, I thought, nothing in life could change those eyes. His quality must be apparent to an idiot, a fool. I burned with questions I could not ask. In any, I was afraid, there would be pain.

“Have you seen her, Jerry—lately?”

“I see her every summer. She sends for me.”

I wanted to cry out, “Why are you not with her? How can she let you go away again?”

He said, “She comes up here from Mannville whenever she can. She doesn’t have a job now.”

His face shone in the firelight.

“She wanted to give me a puppy, but they can’t let any one boy keep a puppy. You remember the suit I had on last Sunday?” He was plainly proud. “She sent me that for Christmas. The Christmas before that”—he drew a long breath, savoring the memory—“she sent me a pair of skates.”

“Roller skates?”

My mind was busy, making pictures of her, trying to understand her. She had not, then, entirely deserted or forgotten him. But why, then— I thought, “I must not condemn her without knowing.”

“Roller skates. I let the other boys use them. They’re always borrowing them. But they’re careful of them.”

What circumstance other than poverty——

“I’m going to take the dollar you gave me for taking care of Pat,” he said, “and buy her a pair of gloves.”

I could only say, “That will be nice. Do you know her size?”

“I think it’s 8½,” he said.

He looked at my hands.

“Do you wear 8½?” he asked.

“No. I wear a smaller size, a 6.”