WHEN Lady Talbot leaned over the side of the big bed to awaken Dickie Harding she wished with all her heart that she had just such a little boy of her own; and when Dickie awoke and looked in her kind eyes he felt quite sure that if he had had a mother she would have been like this lady.
"Only about the face," he told himself, "not the way she's got up; nor yet her hair nor nuffink of that sort."
"Did you sleep well?" she asked him, stroking his hair with extraordinary gentleness.
"Ain't it soft, neither," he answered. "I don't know as ever I felt of anythink quite as soft without it was the geese as 'angs up along the Broadway Christmas-time."
"Why, the bed's made of goose-feathers," she said, and Dickie was delighted by the coincidence.
"'Ave you got e'er a little boy?" he asked, pursuing his first waking thought.
"No, dear; if I had I could lend you some of his clothes. As it is, we shall have to put you into your own." She spoke as though she were sorry.
Dickie saw no matter for regret. "My father 'e bought me a little coat for when it was cold of a night lying out."
"In the bed with the green curtains," said Dickie. This led to Here Ward, and Dickie would willingly have told the whole story of that hero in full detail, but the lady said after breakfast, and now it was time for our bath. And sure enough there was a bath of steaming water before the fireplace, which was in quite another part of the room, so that Dickie had not noticed the cans being brought in by a maid in a pink print dress and white cap and apron.
"Come," said the lady, turning back the bed-clothes.
Somehow Dickie could not bear to let that lady see him crawl clumsily across the floor, as he had to do when he moved without his crutch. It was not because he thought she would make fun of him; perhaps it was because he knew she would not. And yet without his crutch, how else was he to get to that bath? And for no reason that he could have given he began to cry.
The lady's arms were round him in an instant.
"What is it, dear? Whatever is it?" she asked; and Dickie sobbed out--
"I ain't got my crutch, and I can't go to that there barf without I got it. Anything 'ud do--if 'twas only an old broom cut down to me 'eighth. I'm a cripple, they call it, you see. I can't walk like wot you can."