Jason answered with hardihood: “No, but those things go into the baskets of all of our customers these days. They are samples that are sent to us by factories. They’re new kinds of food that Peter Potter wants all of his customers to try.” In the face of this Mahala thanked Jason and kept the samples that he had brought. She may have had a doubt that every grocery basket in Ashwater contained the lavish number of samples that came in hers, but she realized that Jason and Peter were two persons out of the whole town who were trying to be generous, to be kind, to conceal their heartfelt pity for the thing that had happened to her and to her mother. With the empty basket in his hand, Jason stood watching Mahala. He was trying to think of some excuse for remaining. To him she shone like a star in her dark, ugly environment. The boy who never had known a real home or mother love, worshipped her as he would have worshipped an angel. But in the close contact that he had reached with her in the days of her adversity, he had learned that her needs were strictly human. He could not help seeing that even her closest friends of a short time previous were beginning quietly but definitely to desert her. Through the assistance he had been able to give her in moving and settling, he could not keep from observing that none of Mrs. Spellman’s former friends and none of Mahala’s were on the spot to offer either sympathy or help. In his heart the old bitterness and the rebellion against the power of the banker surged up to white heat. Here was another manifestation of what riches could do. He had watched every day to learn whether Junior was still Mahala’s friend, and he had decided that Junior had deserted her when he discovered that she was not the creature of wealth and influence that she always had been. His heart almost broken for her, he impulsively started toward her. “Mahala,” he cried, “I wish——” Mahala turned toward him. The detailed picture of her beauty struck him forcibly. He remembered the culture of her home life, her careful rearing, her mental and physical fineness. She was smiling on him quietly as she said, in a subdued voice: “You wish what, Jason?” Realizing the immeasurable distance between them, he found himself unable to say what it was that he wished, so he temporized: “I wish,” he said, “that everything in this world was different.” Mahala knew that he, too, had been stripped of even the little that he had; that he had lost his mother. She wholly misunderstood. She asked sympathetically: “Do you never hear anything concerning your mother, Jason?” and this, more than anything else, brought him to quick realization of the distance between them. Slowly he shook his head. At last he said: “She never in all her life acted toward me as I have seen other mothers act toward their boys, and since she went away and left me without a word as she did, I am beginning to believe that she was not my real mother.”