t 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
brighten her day by day. Now she comes again for the same small wage,
but with other need, no doubt: the expenses of it all, a rose-bush for
his breast. She told me this calmly as though it caused her no grief. It
was not my privilege, it is not our privilege, to share her unutterable
bereavement.

"She has asked to go on with the sittings. I have told her to come
to-morrow. But she does not realize all that this involves with the
portrait. You will have to bring new canvases, it will have to be a new
work. She is in mourning. Her hands will have to be left out, she has
hurt them; they are bandaged. The new portrait will be of the head and
face only. But the chief reason is the change of expression. The light
which was in her face and which you have partly caught upon your
canvases, has died out; it was brutally put out. The old look is gone.
It is gone, and will never come back--the tender, brooding, reverent
happiness and peace of motherhood with the child at her knee--that
great earthly beacon-light in women of ages past. It was brutally put
out but it did not leave blankness behind it. There has come in its
place another light, another ancient beacon-light on the faces of women
of old--the look of faith in immortal things. She is not now the mother
with the tenderness of this earth but the mother with the expectation of
eternity. Her eyes have followed him who has left her arms and gone into
a distance. Ever she follows him into that distance. Your portrait, if
you can paint it, will be the mother with the look of immortal things in
her face."

* * * * *

When she entered the room next morning, at the sight of her in mourning
and so changed in every way, with one impulse they all rose to her. She
took no notice,--perhaps it would have been unendurable to notice,--but
she stepped forward as usual, and climbed to the platform without
faltering, and he posed her for the head and shoulders. Then, to study
the effect from