This was the first of many discussions, or rather of astonished exclamations from the mother, met by a stubborn and at last a silent obstinacy on the part of the boy. For of late he had scarcely slept, he had been so anxious; he had discovered that the people in the house, with the usual Italian dread of a cough, believed that "the beautiful little American," as they called his mother, was doomed. Mother and son had never been separated; the mother shed tears over the idea of a separation now; and then a few more because Maso did not "care." "It doesn't seem to be anything to _you_," she declared, reproachfully. But Maso, grim-faced and wretched, held firm. In this dead-lock, Mrs. Roscoe at last had the inspiration of asking Benjamin Waterhouse, who was spending the summer at the Bagni, and whom she knew to be a frugal man, to take charge of Maso during her absence. Maso, who under other circumstances would have fought the idea of a tutor with all his strength, now yielded without a word. And then the mother, unwillingly and in a flood of tears, departed. She went by slow stages to Aix-les-Bains; even her first letter, however, much more the later ones, exhaled from each line her pleasure in the cooler air and in her returning health. She sent to Maso, after a while, a colored photograph of herself, taken on the shore of Lake Bourget, and the picture was to the lonely boy the most precious thing he had ever possessed; for it showed that the alarming languor had gone; she was no longer thin and wan. He carried the photograph with him, and when he was alone he took it out. For he was suffering from the deepest pangs of homesickness. He was homesick for his mother, for his mother's room (the only home he had ever known), with all its attractions and indulgences; he could always play his games there; she was never tired of them nor of the noise and disorder which they might occasion; she was never tired of Mr. Tiber; she was never tired of Indians and war-whoops, nor of tents made of her shawls. She always petted him and made much of him; she was so little serious herself that she had unconsciously kept him childlike; in many things they had been like two children together. In the life they led he had but small opportunity to make friendships with other lads. He had played with the American boys of his age whom he had met here and there, but they were always travellers; they never stayed long. His only comrade had been a lad in Pisa named Luigi. But even Luigi could not play games half as well as his mother could, nor live in the tent half as satisfactorily. He said nothing of his homesickness to his tutor; Waterhouse thought him a dull, hangdog sort of boy, and also a boy incredibly, monstrously ignorant. "What can that feather-brained little woman have been about not to have sent him to school long ago!" was his thought.