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burden had been lifted from your shoulder... You left me that day after holding me to you a long while, and you wept. After you had gone I lay on my new bed contemplating the ceiling, dazed and still. Then your friend came in, and I raised to her a complaining, bewildered look. She knelt at the side of the bed and laid her hand on my forehead and said nothing. I said in a quavering voice:

"Will you allow me to call you Mama?"

She kissed me once more and said, laughing:

"That is what I hoped to hear from you, for the word 'Mama' from your mouth means many things — does it not?"

Yes, so it was... I tried to make your memory a frame in which I set her... I wiped from my arms the traces of your arms and stretched my arms out to her... I was thirsty, and she gave me to drink from the wide, great sea of her love... Before I knew it I was coming toward her, hesitant, carrying my affections to her on the palm of my hand, laughing to delight her, happy to make her happy. I wanted her to fill for me a vast emptiness on whose edge I stood; I wanted her to stand before my soul, to ward off from me the desolation of the hungry shadows at the turnings of my days! But how many times could even that noble, beloved woman not fill an emptiness or blot out a blackness! How many times did I hide my face in my hands in the caverns of the nights and sob, crying in a deep, hoarse voice: "Mother, come to me..."

You visited me many times during that summer holiday. You would come elegant and beautiful, the jewels adorning you in your

wealth, and I would look at you dazzled, accepting your costly gifts with a trembling hand, and sit beside you — you asking and I answering — until I asked you my one bewildered question:

"When shall I go home with you, Mama?"

And you said, with anguish and a smile: "Soon, my darling; be patient a little"...

Once I came back from school to hear you saying to "Mama," in a voice like a lament:

"I shall send you a sum every month so that you can buy her what she likes; all that matters to me is that you love her as a daughter of your own"...

My head spun and my throat went dry; then the sweat poured from me and I fell to the floor. I opened my eyes to see you, pale of face, tending me. I shut