But one day, having come in unexpectedly alone, he found her on the divan in the living-room, evidently weeping, and his heart went out to her.  He flung himself down on his knees beside her.

“Oh, what is it?  What is the matter?” he whispered.

Her whole body was writhing.  She uncovered her eyes and looked at him pitifully, and yet with a certain dignity.  Those beautiful eyes, brimming with tears, were not reddened, and their gaze was steady.  “If I tell you, will you keep my secret?” she whispered back, “or, rather, it is not a secret since Doctor Gordon knows it.  I wish he did not, but will you keep your knowledge from him?”

“I promise you I will,” said James fervently.

“I am terribly ill,” said Mrs. Ewing simply.  “I suffer at times tortures.  Don’t ask me what the matter is.  It is too dreadful, and although I have no reason to feel so, it seems to me ignominious.  I am ashamed of being so ill.  I feel disgraced by it, wicked.”  She covered her face again and sobbed.

“Don’t, don’t,” said James, out of his senses completely.  “Don’t, I can’t bear it.  I love you so.  Don’t!  I will cure you.”

“You cannot.  Doctor Gordon does not admit that my case is hopeless, but he gives no hope, and you must have noticed how he suffers when he sees me suffer.  He runs away from me because he can do nothing to help me.  That is the worst of it all.  I could bear the pain for myself, but for the others, too!  Oh, I wish there was some little back door of life out of which one could slip, and no blame to anybody, in a case like this.  But there is nothing but the horrible front door, which means such agony to everybody who is left, as well as the one that goes.”  Mrs. Ewing had completely lost control of herself.  She sobbed again and moaned.

James covered one of her cold hands with kisses.  “Don’t, don’t,” he begged.  “Don’t, I love you.”

Suddenly Mrs. Ewing came to the comprehension of what he said.  She looked at his bent head—­James had a curly head like a boy’s—­and a strange look came into her eyes, as if she were regarding him across an immeasurable gulf.  Nobody had ever seemed quite so far away in the world as this boy with his cry of love to the woman old enough to be his mother.  It was not the fact of her superior age alone, it was her disease, it was her sense of being done forever with anything like this that gave her, as it were, a view of earth from outside, and yet she had a sense of comfort.  James was even weeping.  She felt his tears on her hand.  It did her good that anybody could love her so little as to be able to stay by and see her suffer, and weep for her, and not rush forth in a rage of misery like Thomas Gordon.  In a second, however, she had command of herself.  She drew her hand away.  “Doctor Elliot,” she said, “you forget yourself.”

“No, no, I don’t,” protested James.  “It is not as if I—­I were thinking of you in that way.  I am not.  I know you could not possibly think of me as a girl might.  It is only because I love you.  I have never seen anybody like you.”