He told her that he got his shilling from two toffs for playing with a little girl, and the explanation satisfied her; but she could have cried at the waste of the money, which would have been such a God-send to her.  He cried altogether, however, at sight of her face, having expected it to look so pleased, and then she told him, with caresses, that the picture was the one thing she had been longing for ever since she came to London.  How had he known this, she asked, and he clapped his hands gleefully, and said he just knowed when he saw it in the shop window.

“It was noble of you,” she said, “to spend all your siller on me.”

“Wasn’t it, mother?” he crowed “I’m thinking there ain’t many as noble as I is!”

He did not say why he had been so good to her, but it was because she had written no letters to Thrums since the intrusion of Elspeth; a strange reason for a boy whose greatest glory at one time had been to sit on the fender and exultingly watch his mother write down words that would be read aloud in the wonderful place.  She was a long time in writing a letter, but that only made the whole evening romantic, and he found an arduous employment in keeping his tongue wet in preparation for the licking of the stamp.

But she could not write to the Thrums folk now without telling them of Elspeth, who was at present sleeping the sleep of the shameless in the hollow of the bed, and so for his sake, Tommy thought, she meant to write no more.  For his sake, mark you, not for her own.  She had often told him that some day he should go to Thrums, but not with her; she would be far away from him then in a dark place she was awid to be lying in.  Thus it seemed, to Tommy that she denied herself the pleasure of writing to Thrums lest the sorry news of Elspeth’s advent should spoil his reception when he went north.

So grateful Tommy gave her the picture, hoping that it would fill the void.  But it did not.  She put it on the mantelpiece so that she might just sit and look at it, she said, and he grinned at it from every part of the room, but when he returned to her, he saw that she was neither looking at it nor thinking of it.  She was looking straight before her, and sometimes her lips twitched, and then she drew them into her mouth to keep them still.  It is a kind of dry weeping that sometimes comes to miserable ones when their minds stray into the happy past, and Tommy sat and watched her silently for a long time, never doubting that the cause of all her woe was that she could not write to Thrums.

He had seldom seen tears on his mother’s face, but he saw one now.  They had been reluctant to come for many a day, and this one formed itself beneath her eye and sat there like a blob of blood.

His own began to come more freely.  But she needn’t not expect him to tell her to write nor to say that he didn’t care what Thrums thought of him so long as she was happy.

The tear rolled down his mother’s thin cheek and fell on the grey shawl that had come from Thrums.