"I want to see you!" he mumbled. "It has been so long since I saw you!
What's the matter with you? Where are your hands? Why don't you put your
arms around me?"




VI

The class had been engaged with another model. Their work was forced and
listless. As days passed without the mother's return, their thought and
their talk concerned itself more and more with her disappearance. Why
had she not come back? What had befallen her? What did it all mean?
Would they ever know?

One day after their luncheon-hour, as they were about to resume work,
the teacher of the class entered. He looked shocked; his look shocked
them; instant sympathy ran through them. He spoke with difficulty:

"She has come back. She is down-stairs. Something had befallen her
indeed. She told me as briefly as possible and I tell you all I know.
Her son, a little fellow who had just been chosen for the cathedral
choir school was run over in the street. A mention of it--the usual
story--was in the papers, but who of us reads such things in the papers?
They bore us; they are not even news. He was taken to St. Luke's, and
she has been at St. Luke's, and the end came at St. Luke's, and all the
time we have been here a few yards distant and have known nothing of it.
Such is New York! It was to help pay for his education in music that she
first came to us, she said. And it was the news that he had been chosen
for the choir school that accounts for the new happiness which we saw