“Wondering what?”

“Whether some day you’d say something.”

“I wanted to.  I wanted to talk to you about—­about it all.  But I was afraid it might make you sad.  I like to think of you always happy, dearest.  And I couldn’t bear to be the one to chase away your smile I love so much.”

“It’s thinking of you helps me to smile, Petie,” said his mother, reverting to the pet name of his childhood as she stroked his smooth, black hair.  “If ’twasn’t for knowing I’ve got you—­and your loving me—­I do believe I could never smile.”

“You’re not unhappy?” Peter cried out, startled.  It would be a dreadful pain to know that the placid reserve of this sweet, loved woman meant unhappiness.

“Not while I have you.  But—–­”

“You must go on, dear.  Tell me what you feel.  We’re here together, all alone in the night, talking out our hearts.  It seems as if it was meant to be—­my finding you waiting here.”

“I guess maybe it was, Petie.  Something kind of said to me, ’You wait up for him.  He wants you.’  And I—­why, I always want you, boy.”

“Darling!  We’ve got each other fast.”

“Thanks be, dear!  My!  You don’t know the times I’ve sneaked in and set in this room when you was away.  And even now, if you’re go’n’ to be out pretty late, I bring in my work ’most always when your pa’s out.  I generally slip back to my room before you come in, because I know you think I oughtn’t to be sittin’ up.  You mightn’t just understand that ’twas because this is my only real home.”

“Your only real home?  Why, Mother!”

“The rest of the house is so big—­and so awful new-fashioned and grand.  Not like me a bit,” she apologized meekly—­but not with the flurried meekness of her apologies to Peter senior.  “Here you’ve saved all my dear old things I had in the days before everything was big.  I never can get used to it, and I never will now.  It’s the bigness, I guess, that’s seemed—­somehow—­to take your pa and Ena away from me—­long ago.  But I’ve got you.  And you let me come here.  So I am happy.  I’m a real happy woman, Petie.  And I want you to be happy the way you used to be—­or some better way, not all restless like you are now.  I guess if there was some one you loved different from me you wouldn’t make a new life for yourself without a little place in it for mother, would you—­just a weenty little place I could come and live in sometimes for a while?”

“I’d want you in it always,” said Peter.  He leaned up and wound his arms around the plump, formless waist in the neat dressing-gown.  “So would she—­if there were a she.  I hate the ‘bigness,’ too—­the kind of false, smart bigness that you mean.  We’ll have a little house—­she and you and I. For your room will be there, and you’ll be in it whenever father’ll spare you.  But I’m running away in what I used to call my ‘dreamobile!’ I haven’t found her yet.  That is, I found her once and lost her again.  I’m looking for her now.  Mother, do you know what a ’leitmotif’ is?”