“I should like to, tremendously,” lied Dawson, with a pleasant smile; “but you see she’s going away to-morrow. She was awfully cut up about missing you fellows--I think she was at a luncheon, or some such thing.” He courageously took the chances of any one’s having seen her naïvely admiring the Washington Elm and the Longfellow House on the afternoon in question. “She’s going to be here such a very short time”--this was a detail, but it seemed just as well to dwell on it--“that you can fancy how I feel about being laid up like this.” Bigelow said, “rotten,” or some equally piquant idiom of assent, and Charlie Bolo, by commenting technically on a Dutch tile he had come across, was on the point of giving an entirely new turn to the talk, when something happened. It has often been told how little Dickey Dawson, once upon a time, saved somebody or other’s life by coolly dangling himself to the bridle of a big, runaway horse. The occasion on which he drew red hot poker sketches where a dog had bitten the calf of his leg, has likewise had its historians. But no one has ever described what took place when, in the midst of Charlie Bolo’s exposition of tile painting, Dickey called, “Come in!” to a doubting knock at the door, and Mrs. Dawson advanced two steps into the study and then stopped. For a moment no one, with the exception of Dawson, grasped the situation. He had grasped it and was wrestling with it as he threw off the rug that covered him where he lay on the sofa--as he stepped across the room--as he placed his hands on his mother’s shoulders and kissed her lightly on the cheek. He had grasped the situation, but he was utterly at a loss to know what to do with it. “Didn’t you get my telegram?” his mother was saying; “why, that’s funny--I sent one from the hotel quite a time ago, ‘Am worried about sore throat will come to see you’--just ten words exactly.” Then he found himself introducing his three friends to her: Tommy first, Charlie Bolo second, and Bigelow last, and as he pronounced their names slowly and distinctly, he tried to look ahead and discover what he should do next. On realising that the impassive Tommy was being presented to her, Mrs. Dawson began to extend her hand toward him; but her impulse collapsed for some reason or other and the movement resulted in nothing more definite than the disclosure of her silk mits. The three men were so completely outside of any calculations she had made before knocking on her son’s door, that she had nothing to say to them just then, so she turned once more to Dickey with frank adoration and said,-- “I _was_ worried about your throat.” “I suppose, like the rest of us, Mrs. Dawson, you have found out how seriously he objects to the serious,” ventured Charlie Bolo airily. The smile Mrs. Dawson gave him did not lack sweetness, for she had been looking at Dickey; but it was desperately vague, and Bolo felt that he had made a false start.