It was considered to be a part of my steady spoiling of Little Yeogh Wough that, while he was still only seven years old, I sent for him to come over to us in Paris, where we were staying for three months at the HÔtel Meurice.

As a matter of fact, it was in order that he might not be utterly spoiled that I sent for him. I had very strong doubts as to the discipline that was being kept up at the London house by the old Nurse, under the supervision of my sweet-natured, but too gentle and yielding, aunt.

"I don't suppose we shall know him for the same boy when he gets out here," I said to Miss Torry, who was with us. "My aunt, you know, is one of those dear women who always let in thin ends of wedges all round them, and she will have had time in a fortnight to let in a good many in his daily life."

My secretary looked grieved.

"Oh, but you must have more confidence in him than that! He's so fine a character, even though he is only seven years old, that I don't think he will have changed just because he may have been differently handled. Besides, he does worship you so much. He wouldn't do anything to vex you for the world."

"I don't know. I think it was a little dangerous of me yesterday to tell those French people what a wonderful boy he is. For one thing, it's always silly to praise one's own children; and secondly, it's a mistake to praise anything or anybody to people who haven't seen them yet. You must not even give praise that is solidly true, because, if you do, something always happens to make it false. You say your child has a skin as clear as the may-flower, and by the time you show him up he's developed pimples. It's the law of Compensation again. It acts in little things just as in big ones. Anyhow, the boy is sure to have sincere eyes and a sincere walk, and these two things will go a long way. So very few people have sincere movements! You've only to look around this hotel to see that."

"I only hope he'll get here safely!" breathed Miss Torry, who was always on the look out for disasters. "He's coming over with an irresponsible sort of man, and accidents do happen so easily that in the present day one can't be too careful. A precious child like that ought to be looked after by somebody that can be trusted. Mr. P—— can't be trusted. Why, don't you remember, he took his own two-year-old child for a drive somewhere on the East Coast last summer and it fell out of the old victoria without his knowing it, and he'd left it on the roadside quite a mile behind him before he missed it?"

Yes, this was true. I had forgotten this incident, and her recalling it to my mind made me anxious. Still, this Mr. P—— had happened to be coming over to Paris on purpose to see me on some business matter, and the temptation to let him bring out the boy of my heart had been too strong to resist.

Besides, the sight of Paris would do much to help forward Little Yeogh Wough's education.

"How sorry he'll be to find you so ill and unlike yourself!" went on Miss Torry. (I had a cold so bad that it had practically become bronchitis, which, for some mysterious reason, usually happens to me in Paris.) "But how delighted he'll be with your new black and white frock, and with the hat with violets!"

Yes. Even at that early age he loved my clothes. He loved them so much that I used sometimes to wonder if all his devotion to myself would go if I were shabby and lived in sordid surroundings. As it is, I ask myself now, in these later days, whom I should dress for if he should be killed in the war.

His father has the kind of devotion that is not exacting about clothes, and would burn with as steady a flame if its idol were in sacking as if she wore the most marvellous confections of the French man-dressmakers.

My racking fits of coughing would not let me go to the station to meet my treasure; but I dressed myself with as much care to be beheld by him as if he had been a grown man. I wonder how many mothers put themselves out to cultivate beauty for the satisfaction of sons of not yet eight years old?

But the beauty cultivation was all on my side this time. For when he appeared, marshalled by his father and by the friend who had brought him over, he wore his little bowler and a badly cut, dark overcoat that he disliked, and his face was so sullen that the sight of him gave me a shock.

"Nurse said I must wear this coat, and Auntie said so, too," he complained, as he struggled out of the objectionable garment after duly removing his still more objectionable headgear. "I've got a cap in my pocket that I wore coming over in the boat, but they told me I must put the bowler on again when I got to the station here. And I nearly didn't get here at all. I nearly fell out of the train."

"Nearly fell out of the train?"

"Lor'!" exclaimed Miss Torry, throwing up her hands. "I knew something was going to happen. Whatever was it?"

The friend who had brought the boy began to explain, with a miserable sense of guilt. He had dropped asleep in the train on the way to Paris, and Little Yeogh Wough, wanting to explore the corridor, had opened a door which he thought led out into it, but which was really on the opposite side and only led out on to the railway track and into the void of the night. He had been in the very act of stepping down out of the train, which was going at seventy-five miles an hour, when a Frenchman sitting in the compartment jumped up and sprang forward and clutched at him—saving him by a second's space only from what must have been certain death!

Strange! To think as I look back now that, by this act of saving an English child, that unknown Frenchman saved a soldier who was to help to defend France against the next great onslaught of the Germans!

"I told you so," said Miss Torry to my husband and me, when our unlucky friend had retired to get ready for dinner. "I told you that man wasn't a fit person to have the charge of a child—and such a child as that. What a mercy that Frenchman had his wits about him! One can't be too careful whom one trusts children with in the present day."

"And I told you that the boy would be changed," I said to her in a low voice, so that Little Yeogh Wough, who had run into the next room, might not hear. "He's not my boy at all. The difference is perfectly amazing."

Miss Torry threw up her hands again.

"That's it, you see. I knew how it would be directly he got under your aunt's influence. I knew she'd let him have his way in everything. And Old Nurse, too! I always did feel that it's never any good trusting anybody who's got a long upper lip. Well, now I'll go and see that he washes his face and hands properly. He actually hasn't said yet that he's sorry you've got such a dreadful cold. I'll tell him what I think of him."

And she whisked into the inner room.

"I believe a good deal of his disagreeableness comes from that overcoat," I said to my husband. "He feels that he's looking his worst in it, and he can't be himself when he feels that. It's all Old Nurse's fault. She said he'd better not have a fawn cloth one, because his vanity must be checked at any cost."

Ah! The dear boy! How vain he was when he first put on his khaki eleven years afterwards!

When his bedtime came, on this his first evening in Paris, he did not get up to say good night when told to do so.

"Roland, I told you to go to bed. Did you hear me? Put your things away at once."

He lifted his big brown eyes with rebellion showing in them for the first time in his life.

"Auntie doesn't mind whether I go to bed when she tells me to or not."

"Oh, doesn't she? I see it was time I had you brought over here. You will put your things away instantly and go to bed."

Clearly he knew the something in my voice which told him that obedience would be enforced at once and to the uttermost. And he rose and went.

And yet people have always accused me of spoiling him!

"You see, Little Yeogh Wough," I explained to him in one of our good-night talks more than a week later. "I want you to grow up to be a real man, and not a sham one. That is why you must obey. Suppose, when you grow up, you became a soldier—an officer—and you were ordered to take your men to a certain spot on a battlefield by a certain time, and you said to yourself in a slouchy way that a minute late in starting or arriving wouldn't matter. Well, then, do you know what would happen? Things would go wrong in that battle, and very likely your men would be shot down by the guns of your own people; because, you see, the order would have been given to fire just when you were due to have cleared out of a certain place—and if you haven't cleared out you yourself are to blame for any mischief that is done. And it's the same in life. There's a plan in everything, if you look for it, and if we are disobedient and don't keep time, we put that plan all wrong."

But that first night I did not have a good-night talk with him at all. He did not ask me to come and see him in bed, though before I left home he had been heartbroken at the prospect of my nightly talks with him being interrupted. For a further and shocking proof of his new naughtiness had come to light.

Miss Torry, searching in the pockets of his inelegant and despised overcoat, had pulled forth something which drew from her a louder "Lor'!" than ever I had heard her utter before. She held the something up and revealed a long thick tress of coppery brown hair.

"Roland!" I exclaimed. "What is that?"

"It's a piece of Clare's hair," he told us, at once and quite frankly. Even in his worst moods I never knew him tell an untruth. "I cut it off just before I came away from home, so I hadn't time to put it anywhere but in my pocket. I did it because she wouldn't let me do cooking on her toy kitchen range, that works with methylated spirit. I just got my scissors quickly and cut it. Nobody knew I did it, though I dare say Nurse has found out by now."

"Oh, Roland!"

My reproachful exclamation was accompanied by a stream of reproaches from the horrified Miss Torry. I remembered then that all through his few short years hitherto Little Yeogh Wough had shown a great interest in cooking. And he had never even seen the kitchen, or any part of the basement, of his London home yet. He had called the basement "Griffiths's Dark," when he was two and a half, because Griffiths was the name of the cook who reigned there at that time; and the name had stuck. We had all spoken of the basement ever since as "Griffiths's Dark."

And so his curious leanings towards cooking had led him to such a breach of good conduct as the cutting off of a goodly portion of his four-and-a-half-year-old sister's hair because she would not let him use her toy range with methylated spirit!

In very deed he had fallen from grace during this fortnight of lax discipline.

"Roland," I said, "I would give you a whipping for this if I had actually caught you doing it, or had been told of it at once. But, as things are, I will punish you in another way. I will not come and see you in bed for a whole week. I am very much hurt indeed. I did not think you could ever behave so badly."

He said nothing. But his lips quivered and his eyes filled with tears.

He was to sleep in a little room opening out of mine and his father's. I meant at first not to go in there at all, but on second thoughts I simply went in and saw that his bedclothes were properly arranged. I did not say a second good night to him, but came away as if the person in the bed were a total stranger to me.

"Are you going so soon?" His voice came after me rather piteously. "Aren't you going to talk to me?"

"Not to-night, Roland. You know that, because I said so. You must go to sleep now."

"Won't you call me Little Yeogh Wough?" he persisted wistfully.

"No. You're not Little Yeogh Wough to-night. You're not the same boy that I left when I came away from home. You're only Roland. I don't know how it is. You used to keep your true self when you went away from me, but this time you've lost it. I suppose a fortnight has been too long. Now go to sleep!"

"They've taken all the romance out of him," I said to Miss Torry, when I got back to the sitting-room.

"Lor'!" she exclaimed. And up went her hands again until she looked like a surprised angel. "The things that are going on in that house! They've got the puppies all indoors, messing up the whole place; and the cook's given notice, because Roland has been up into her room and made her window so that it won't shut—in this weather, too!—because he wanted to rig up a toy telephone between there and one of the servants' room windows in the next house. He says the boy next door is allowed to do what he likes, so he doesn't see why he himself shouldn't be. Did you ever hear of such a thing?"

"Well, you'll have to take him out of my way to-morrow, Miss Torry. Take him round and show him Paris. I'll work by myself. Strange, that he should have altered so much in a fortnight! But that's just because he's not commonplace. Commonplace people can't rise, but they can't sink, either. It takes a person with something great in him to get down low."

So Little Yeogh Wough was taken by Miss Torry round Paris, and he also went with me into shops and to do business in post offices, and quite learned the ways of the place and of the people. But it made my cold worse.

"Never mind," I said. "My having a bad cold like this means that my new photographs will be good. I always pay for a good photograph with an illness. I know I should pay for a good oil-painting portrait with my death."

Little Yeogh Wough wrote and told my dear friend Mrs. Croy how he was getting on. And Mrs. Croy responded by sending coals to Newcastle in the shape of an enormous box of chocolates.

Mrs. Croy was a really darling creature of eighty-nine who dressed with a view to looking nineteen, and she had a high opinion of Little Yeogh Wough because, as she said, he was the only child living who had been nice to her.

The fact of the matter was, that she was a difficult person for a child to be "nice" to, for the reason that she apparently did her making-up without looking in the glass, and so was often to be found with an eyebrow coming down one side of her cheek and some rouge on her chin or on her forehead. Irreverent children had been accustomed to make remarks on these peculiarities, as also on the fact that the colour of her wig changed every day; but the boy of my heart, who liked her, would not have appeared to notice the matter if she had come before him without her head. And for this she was so grateful that she loved him passionately.

I loved her, too. It is astonishing how lovable women who make up badly usually are.

It was astonishing, too, how much Little Yeogh Wough loved women. He loved everybody and everything, for that matter, with a great and deep love and sympathy; such a love and sympathy as led him, for instance, to get out of his warm little bed one gloomy and bone-chilling morning of a London winter and labour for hours in the sodden garden to get into shelter some newly born puppies who were exposed to the icy rain. But most of all he loved women.

He loved them in a tender, caressing, worshipping way, and he loved everything connected with them; frocks, hats, dainty shoes and long suÈde gloves, beautiful furs and scents, and pots of powder and sweet-smelling soaps and creams. He could never understand how the ordinary boy did not care for these things. He liked to go out shopping with me more than almost anything else in the world, and he hated it when his regular day-school life prevented him from doing so.

"He won't be one of the men who are not interesting to talk to until they are thirty," I said to Miss Torry many a time as the months passed and I saw his character shaping itself. "If he goes on as he's doing now he'll be a most fascinating man with women, even in his early twenties."

"That's what I'm always telling people," replied my secretary. "And he'll be very manly with it. I can't understand how it is some people can't think a boy manly unless he's always stumping about in the thickest boots and talking about cricket and football."

"Oh, they're all manly!" I said. "But I always think the refined and clever ones are really the manliest and bravest. Just as it is always the people brought up in luxury that can live a rough life most successfully. A man came to me the other day and said he wanted to marry, but he didn't want to choose a lady because he was going out to Canada and he wanted to rough it; and I told him that he was making a mistake and that if he really wanted somebody who would do hard and even degrading work he must get a lady above all things, and that the more softly brought up she'd been the better she'd do the nastiest jobs. You can never get a servant to clean up after a dog, but you'll see duchesses doing it by the dozen at fashionable dog shows. And boys and men are like that. It isn't always the hulking footballer who will volunteer first to lead a forlorn hope."

The night on which, at the Paris hotel, I said Yes once more to Little Yeogh Wough's cry of: "Come and see me in bed, mother!" is a night which I shall never forget.

There was gaiety all round us in the great building, from whose courtyard there came up to us sounds of voices and laughter mingling with the roll of carriages and the clatter of cars. But we were too happy to be gay. Our heads were resting on the same pillow and the boy of my heart was patting my cheek with one small, but very strong and brown hand.

"It's so nice to have you come in and talk to me again, Big Yeogh Wough," he said a little tremblingly.

"Yes. It is very nice," I agreed. "You won't drive me away from you again, will you?"

"No. I'll be good. It's been perfectly beastly having you angry with me. And to-morrow you'll let me buy you some flowers, won't you? I've got enough of my pocket money to buy some tulips. Oh, it's very early for them, I know, and they'll cost a lot; but it pays to get them, because they die so prettily. Other flowers look ugly when they're dying, but tulips don't."

"That's their Compensation for looking vulgar when they're alive," thought I. But I did not say so.

And then we began to sing together, very low, a little song of the French navy, which I had taught him a few months before.

Oh, the joyous freedom and swing that he put into that song—he, a small child, lying there in bed and singing!

Two or three months later, when we had left Paris and were at home again in London, I got an example of his courage.

Ever since he had been going to school and so had been out of reach of the care of nurses, he had had cold after cold. Much good did it do for me to live a life of perpetual watchfulness in the house, taking care that he should get continual fresh air without any draughts, when at his school there was no watch kept and he was allowed to sit for hours between two open windows, or between an open window and an open door! So the colds went on into tonsilitis, and at last he was very ill and had to have a serious operation.

The anÆsthetist who came from one of the London hospitals to administer the chloroform was a man with one of the gentlest and kindest of faces, and yet somehow Little Yeogh Wough, though he had been told nothing, knew from the first that this man's coming boded him no good. He ran to me to protect him, showing an infinite trust in me that in a way was heart-breaking. And then I realised that for the first time a situation had come about in which I could not help him, but in which he had to face whatever there might be of pain and risk quite alone and unhelped, like a grown man.

I told him this, and for a moment his brown wistful eyes met mine with a look in them which I shall never forget. Then he turned and went over to the table that had been made ready for the operation, and lay down upon it, saying quietly:

"I'm quite ready."

That is the way in which he will meet torture and death if they come to him before his part in this war is over. He will steady the shrinking of his sensitive nerves and will look at the danger and measure it and then say bravely: "Now let come what has to come. I am quite ready."

Oh, if I could have foreseen in those days how much of pain and terror would face him in the years to come that I could not save him from!

It happened often just then that the children made railway journeys on which I did not accompany them. I ought to have felt a sense of domestic freedom at their going—for I am a person who hates a home to be an establishment, full of children and servants and expenses—but instead of this, tremors used to seize upon me as to what might happen. For Little Yeogh Wough in particular I was afraid, as he was the sensitive one. The idea of his being at the mercy of horses or motor-cars or the mechanism of a train was horrible to me.

His sister, aged five, always gave people the impression that she could look after herself in any circumstances. His younger brother, aged two, was a baby still. But Little Yeogh Wough himself, all wistfulness and appealing grace, with the haunting sadness always in his brown eyes—what would his sufferings be if any accident brought harm to him and I was not there?

I used at these times to go to the piano and play to myself in order to drive away my fears. I played dance music and coon songs, though I ought to have known that these are the saddest things in the world—far sadder than any Dead Marches in Saul. I can hear myself now singing: "The Lonesome Coon":

Then I stopped, with my fingers on the keys of the piano, and thought:

"What if indeed there were a railway accident and he were killed? How should I bear it?"

And then I found myself singing something else:

"Yes," I went on thinking, "after all, if he were killed in a railway accident or in some other sudden way, I should at least never have to feel afraid of anything for him again. I should not have to wonder how he would front the world if anything were to happen to his father and to me. I should know that the brave little heart and the joyous little soul behind the sad brown eyes were safe."

But what was the use of giving myself over like this to the worship of a child?

It was a good thing for me that just about this time he began to get more matter-of-fact. Anyhow, he was less of a picture and more of an ordinary rascal of a boy when, soon after his thirteenth birthday, we took him with us on a little journey by sea to Russia.