Well, there was Tennelly’s mother!  Dignified, white-haired, beautiful, dominant in her home and clubs, charming to her guests; but—­he could just fancy how she would raise her lorgnette and look “Bonnie” Brentwood over.  There would be no room in that grand house for a girl like Bonnie.  Bonnie!  How the name suited her!  He had a strange protective feeling about that girl, not as if she were like the other girls he knew; perhaps it was a sort of a “Christ-brother” feeling, as the minister had suggested.  But to go on with the list of mothers—­wasn’t there one anywhere to whom he could appeal?  Gila’s mother?  Pah!  That painted, purple image of a mother!  Her own daughter needed to find a real mother somewhere.  She couldn’t mother a stranger!  Mothers!  Why weren’t there enough real ones to go around?  If he had only had a mother, a real one, himself, who had lived, she would have been one to whom he could have told Bonnie’s story, and she would have understood!

He looked into the pictured eyes on the wall and an idea came to him.  It was like an answer to prayer.  Stephen Marshall’s mother!  Why hadn’t he thought of her before?  She was that kind of a mother of course, or Stephen Marshall would not have been the man he was!  If the Bonnie girl could only get to her for a little while!  But would she take her?  Would she understand?  Or might she be too overcome with her own loss to have been able to rally to life again?  He looked into the strong motherly face and was sure not.

He would write to her.  He would put it to the test whether there was a mother in the world or not.  He went back to his room, and wrote her a long letter, red-hot from the depths of his heart; a letter such as he might have written to his own mother if he had ever known her, but such as certainly he had never written to any woman before.  He wrote: 

     DEAR MOTHER OF STEPHEN MARSHALL: 

     I know you are a real mother because Stephen was what he
     was.  And now I am going to let you prove it by coming to you
     with something that needs a mother’s help.

There is a little girl—­I should think she must be about nineteen or twenty years old—­lying in the hospital, worn out with hard work and sorrow.  She has recently lost her father and mother, and had brought her little five-year-old brother to the city a couple of weeks ago.  They were living in a very small room, boarding themselves, she working all day somewhere down-town.  Two days ago, as she was coming home in the trolley, her little brother, crossing the street to meet her, was knocked down and killed by a passing automobile.  We buried him to-day, and the girl fainted dead away on the way back from the cemetery and only recovered consciousness when we got her to the hospital.  The doctor says she has exhausted her vitality and needs to sleep for a week and be fed up; and then she ought to go to some cheerful place where she can just rest for a while and have fresh