“All right, I will saddle up. You coming, Larry?”
“Now, Mother,” warned Nora, “I know his ways and wiles. Remember your duty to your children. You are also inclined to be horribly selfish. Be firm. Hurry up, Kate.”
Left alone with his mother, Larry went deliberately to work with her. Well he knew the immovable quality of her resolution when once her mind was made up. Patiently, quietly, steadily, he argued with her, urging Nora's claims for a year at college.
“She needs a change after her years of hard work.”
Her education was incomplete; the ground work was sound enough, but she had come to the age when she must have those finishing touches that girls require to fit them for their place in life. “She is a splendid girl, but in some ways still a child needing discipline; in other ways mature, too mature. She ought to have her chance and ought to have it now.” One never knew what would happen in the case of girls.
His mother sighed. “Poor Nora, she has had discipline enough of a kind, and hard discipline it has been indeed for you all.”
“Nonsense, Mother, we have had a perfectly fine time together, all of us. God knows if any one has had a hard time it is not the children in this home. I do not like to think of those awful winters, Mother, and of the hard time you had with us all.”
“A hard time!” exclaimed his mother. “I, a hard time, and with you all here beside me, and all so well and strong? What more could I want?” The amazed surprise in her face stirred in her son a quick rush of emotion.
“Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother,” he whispered in her ear. “There is no one like you. Did you ever in all your life seek one thing for yourself, one thing, one little thing? Away back there in Ontario you slaved and slaved and went without things yourself that all the rest of us might get them. Here it has been just the same. Haven't I seen your face and your hands, your poor hands,”--here the boy's voice broke with an indignant passion--“blue with the cold when you could not get furs to protect them? Never, never shall I forget those days.” The boy stopped abruptly, unable to go on.
Quickly the mother drew her son toward her. “Larry, my son, my son, you must never think that a hard time. Did ever a woman have such joy as I? When I think of other mothers and of other children, and then think of you all here, I thank God every day and many times a day that he has given us each other. And, Larry, my son, let me say this, and you will remember it afterwards. You have been a continual joy to me, always, always. You have never given me a moment's anxiety or pain. Remember that. I continually thank God for you. You have made my life very happy.”