But she put the thought from her as soon as possible. She could not plan for the future, and for the present, Maybelle and Erskine Roberts were simply comrades heartily enjoying each other's society, as her own Erskine and Alice Warder had done, without apparently other thoughts than those shared with them by Marian Roberts, who was Erskine's twin.
Ruth wrote to Miss Parker that same evening, giving her a detailed account of one of her talks with Maybelle.
"You may well call hers a 'loyal heart,' my friend," she wrote. "You should hear the pathetic way in which the child talks about you by the hour! Yesterday she said to me:--
"'Sometimes I used to wish that I could call Aunt Mamie, mother. She is the only woman that I ever had such a thought about; I suppose it was because she came close enough to give me an idea of what a real mother would be. I mean to keep her always for my heart-mother. There can be heart-mothers, you know, and in some ways they are almost as dear as real ones. Oh, I wonder if you know how a girl like me sometimes longs and _longs_ for a real mother! I think it is the only possession that I ever envied. Sometimes, Mrs. Burnham, I have been fiercely jealous for hours together, so that I almost hated the girls who chattered about their mothers. Wasn't that dreadful! Oh, I cannot think what would have become of me long before this, if I had not had Aunt Mamie.'"
Thus much Ruth Burnham wrote, and stayed her pen. Was it necessary for her to tell all this? To lay bare even to this woman, who knew so much, the depths of a suffering young heart, thereby revealing the magnitude of the mother's sin against it? And that mother was her daughter, her son's wife! She wanted to write it; there were times when she wanted to shout it out to all the world, just what manner of woman was being sheltered by her name and home. She knew that she would never do it, but ought not Mamie Parker who had mothered the child, to understand? She thought long, she shed a few struggling tears that seemed to burn her face; the hurt at her heart was too deep for tears, and then she hid her face on the writing table and talked with God.
The end of it was that she tore the sheet across and threw the fragments into her grate. And wrote again:--