Miss Mary recognized at a glance the dubious mother of her anonymous pupil.  Perhaps she was disappointed, perhaps she was only fastidious; but as she coldly invited her to enter, she half-unconsciously settled her white cuffs and collar, and gathered closer her own chaste skirts.  It was, perhaps, for this reason that the embarrassed stranger, after a moment’s hesitation, left her gorgeous parasol open and sticking in the dust beside the door, and then sat down at the farther end of a long bench.  Her voice was husky as she began: 

“I heerd tell that you were goin’ down to the Bay tomorrow, and I couldn’t let you go until I came to thank you for your kindness to my Tommy.”

Tommy, Miss Mary said, was a good boy, and deserved more than the poor attention she could give him.

“Thank you, miss; thank ye!” cried the stranger, brightening even through the color which Red Gulch knew facetiously as her “war paint,” and striving, in her embarrassment, to drag the long bench nearer the schoolmistress.  “I thank you, miss, for that! and if I am his mother, there ain’t a sweeter, dearer, better boy lives than him.  And if I ain’t much as says it, thar ain’t a sweeter, dearer, angeler teacher lives than he’s got.”

Miss Mary, sitting primly behind her desk, with a ruler over her shoulder, opened her gray eyes widely at this, but said nothing.

“It ain’t for you to be complimented by the like of me, I know,” she went on, hurriedly.  “It ain’t for me to be comin’ here, in broad day, to do it, either; but I come to ask a favor—­not for me, miss—­not for me, but for the darling boy.”

Encouraged by a look in the young schoolmistress’s eye, and putting her lilac-gloved hands together, the fingers downward, between her knees, she went on, in a low voice: 

“You see, miss, there’s no one the boy has any claim on but me, and I ain’t the proper person to bring him up.  I thought some, last year, of sending him away to Frisco to school, but when they talked of bringing a schoolma’am here, I waited till I saw you, and then I knew it was all right, and I could keep my boy a little longer.  And O, miss, he loves you so much; and if you could hear him talk about you, in his pretty way, and if he could ask you what I ask you now, you couldn’t refuse him.

“It is natural,” she went on, rapidly, in a voice that trembled strangely between pride and humility—­“it’s natural that he should take to you, miss, for his father, when I first knew him, was a gentleman—­and the boy must forget me, sooner or later—­and so I ain’t goin’ to cry about that.  For I come to ask you to take my Tommy—­God bless him for the bestest, sweetest boy that lives—­to—­to—­take him with you.”

She had risen and caught the young girl’s hand in her own, and had fallen on her knees beside her.