Her happy story ended.  She had watched the play of lights on his face as sometimes he, though hungry, with fork in the air paused to listen and to question.  Now as she finished and looked across the table at the picture of him under the lamplight, she was rewarded, she was content; while he ate his plain food, out of her misfortunes she had beautifully nourished his mind.  He did not know this; but she knew it, knew by his look and by his only comment: 

“You had a perfectly splendid time, didn’t you?”

She laughed to herself.

“Now, then,” she said, coming to what had all along been most in her consciousness—­“now, then, tell me about your day.  Begin at the moment you left me.”

He laid down his napkin,—­he could eat no more, and there was nothing more to eat,—­and he folded his hands quite like the head of the house at ease after a careless feast, and began his story.

Well, he had had a splendid day, too.  After he had left her he had gone to the dealer’s on the avenue with the unsold papers.  Then he had crossed over to the cathedral, and for a while had watched the men at work up in the air.  He had walked around to the choir school, but no one was there that morning, not a sound came from the inside.  Then he had started down across the park.  As he sat down to count his money, a man who had climbed up the hillside stopped and asked him a great many questions:  who taught him music and whether any one had ever heard him sing.  This stranger also liked music and he also went to the cathedral, so he claimed.  From that point the story wound its way onward across the busy hours till nightfall.

It was a child’s story, not an older person’s.  Therefore it did not draw the line between pleasant and unpleasant, fair and unfair, right and wrong, which make up for each of us the history of our checkered human day.  It separated life as a swimmer separates the sea:  there is one water which he parts by his passage.  So the child, who is still wholly a child, divides the world.

But as she pondered, she discriminated.  Out of the long, rambling narrative she laid hold of one overwhelming incident, forgetting the rest:  a passing stranger, hearing a few notes of his voice, had stopped to question him about it.  To her this was the first outside evidence that her faith in his musical gift was not groundless.

When he had ended his story she regarded him across the table with something new in her eyes—­something of awe.  She had never hinted to him what she believed he would some day be.  She might be wrong, and thus might start him on the wrong course; or, being right, she might never have the chance to start him on the right one.  In either case she might be bringing to him disappointment, perhaps the failure of his whole life.

Now she still hid the emotion his story caused.  But the stranger of the park had kindled within her that night what she herself had long tended unlit—­the alabaster flame of worship which the mother burns before the altar of a great son.