He (Jerry) sat by the fire with me.... and told me of their two days together. The dog lay close to him and found a comfort there that I did not have for him.... "He stayed right with me," he told me, "except when he ran in the laurel.... There was a place where the grass was high and I lay down in it and hid. I could hear Pat hunting for me.... When he found me he acted crazy, and he ran around and around me, in circles." We watched the flames. "That's an apple log," he said. "It burns the prettiest of any wood." We were very close. He was suddenly impelled to speak. "You look a little bit like my mother," he said. "Especially in the dark, by the fire." "But you were only four, Jerry, when you came here. You have remembered how she looked, all these years?" "My mother lives in Mannville," he said. For a moment, finding that he had a mother shocked me... I did not know why it disturbed me. Then I understood my distress. I was filled with a passionate resentment that any woman should go away and leave her son. A son like this one The orphanage was a wholesome place, the food was more than adequate, the boys were healthy.... Granted, perhaps, that the boy felt no lack, what blood fed the bowels of a woman who did not yearn over this child's lean body that had come in parturition out of her own? "Have you seen her, Jerry - lately?" I asked. "I see her every summer. She sends for me." I wanted to cry out. "Why are you not with her? How can she let you go away again?" He said, "She comes up here from Mannville whenever she can. She doesn't have a job now." His face shone in the firelight. "She wanted to give me a puppy, but they can't let any one boy keep a puppy. You remember the suit I had on last Sunday?" He was plainly proud. "She sent me that for Christmas. The Christmas before that" - he drew a long breath, savoring the memory - "she sent me a pair of skates.... I let the other boys use them, but they're careful of them."