he was beside some one who belonged to him by blood? Because she was his—mother?
At first, after this thought overwhelmed him, he started back a little. He feared lest an obsession controlled his reason. All his life he had been dreaming of his mother; this woman, except that she evidently was the age that his mother must now be, was not either particularly like or unlike the mothers of his dreams. His mother!
He looked down, then gazed again at her face. She was like him! Yes; not he alone observed the likeness of profile to his own; the nurse also noticed the resemblance. When Barney had suddenly started back, the nurse had crept quickly forward, apprehensive of some change in her patient's condition. When she saw none, she looked up questioningly at Barney, and when he shook his head to signify that he had seen nothing more alarming, still the nurse gazed at him intently, and when she turned away it was to scrutinize the face of the sleeping woman with new understanding.
"My mother!" Barney's lips formed to himself. "Mother!"
Yet now he had to know beyond speculation. He saw that Mrs. Wain was just within the door; so he dropped back to her and turned to her in an appeal which she could not refuse. "She is mother?"
"Your mother, sir," the housekeeper said. "If she calls you in her sleep, sir—or awake, if she says Dick, she means you, sir. Dick—you understand?"
"I understand," Barney whispered. "You mean she has been asking for me?"
"When she did not know it, she asked for you. 'Dick, my baby; my boy—Dick,' she said this morning. That was why I brought you."
