“That’s curious!” he said, going closer.  “It—­it looks almost like Lida Harvey.”

“My mother,” I said simply.

“Have you seen her lately?”

“My mother?” I asked, startled.

“No, Lida.”

“I saw her a few days ago.”

“Here?”

“Yes.  She came here, Mr. Howell, two weeks ago.  She looks badly—­as if she is worrying.”

“Not—­about me?” he asked eagerly.

“Yes, about you.  What possessed you to go away as you did?  When my—­bro—­when her uncle accused you of something, you ran away, instead of facing things like a man.”

“I was trying to find the one person who could clear me, Mrs. Pitman.”  He sat back, with his eyes closed; he looked ill enough to be in bed.

“And you succeeded?”

“No.”

I thought perhaps he had not been eating and I offered him food, as I had once before.  But he refused it, with the ghost of his boyish smile.

“I’m hungry, but it’s not food I want.  I want to see her,” he said.

I sat down across from him and tried to mend a table-cloth, but I could not sew.  I kept seeing those two young things, each sick for a sight of the other, and, from wishing they could have a minute together, I got to planning it for them.

“Perhaps,” I said finally, “if you want it very much—­”

“Very much!”

“And if you will sit quiet, and stop tapping your fingers together until you drive me crazy, I might contrive it for you.  For five minutes,” I said.  “Not a second longer.”

He came right over and put his arms around me.

“Who are you, anyhow?” he said.  “You who turn to the world the frozen mask of a Union Street boarding-house landlady, who are a gentlewoman by every instinct and training, and a girl at heart?  Who are you?”

“I’ll tell you what I am,” I said.  “I’m a romantic old fool, and you’d better let me do this quickly, before I change my mind.”

He freed me at that, but he followed to the telephone, and stood by while I got Lida.  He was in a perfect frenzy of anxiety, turning red and white by turns, and in the middle of the conversation taking the receiver bodily from me and holding it to his own ear.

She said she thought she could get away; she spoke guardedly, as if Alma were near, but I gathered that she would come as soon as she could, and, from the way her voice broke, I knew she was as excited as the boy beside me.

She came, heavily coated and veiled, at a quarter after ten that night, and I took her back to the dining-room, where he was waiting.  He did not make a move toward her, but stood there with his very lips white, looking at her.  And, at first, she did not make a move either, but stood and gazed at him, thin and white, a wreck of himself.  Then: 

“Ell!” she cried, and ran around the table to him, as he held out his arms.

The school-teacher was out.  I went into the parlor bedroom and sat in the cozy corner in the dark.  I had done a wrong thing, and I was glad of it.  And sitting there in the darkness, I went over my own life again.  After all, it had been my own life; I had lived it; no one else had shaped it for me.  And if it was cheerless and colorless now, it had had its big moments.  Life is measured by big moments.