Sometimes in the midst of my aching, tearing anxiety I found myself laughing out suddenly at the remembrance of some of the Boy's delightful extravagances; at how, for instance, one night when his battalion was stationed about three and a half miles away from us, he had driven up all that distance and back in a taxicab at midnight in order to get eighteenpence in ready money for a tip for the cab driver. He had been a short journey in the cab already, but the cost of that was going to be put down on an account. He wanted, however, to give a good tip, and, having no small change, he took the cab another seven miles to do it.

Then there had been an occasion when, needing a piece of stout wire, he had secretly but relentlessly removed it from the inside of the handsome and nearly new piano, substituting a stout bootlace to act in its place. For one who had always been responsible far beyond his years—more responsible than most elderly men—he had astonishing little fits of gay irresponsibility in which he fell foul of the authority of everybody except his Big Yeogh Wough.

Perhaps it was these very gleams of wildness that won for him the devotion of the servants in the house.

Once a week everything else in the household routine had to give way to the making of his cake. The cook kneaded her heart's love into it in spite of his having robbed her of her young man for the benefit of the Army, and the others looked on at the making with sorrow and fear in their honest eyes. They might not agree with each other on all points at all times, but they always agreed about him; and so the family cake and the kitchen cake became poor and anÆmic in order that the cake destined for the Front might be rich enough to put any young officer into a state of bilious inefficiency.

Our anxiety to obey official instructions as to describing the contents of parcels led him to write a protest to his sister as Chief Commissariat Officer:

"My dear Bystander,

"I wish you wouldn't apologise all over the outside of my parcels for what is inside them. Why put 'Only six buns and two dried haddocks'? Or: 'Merely a little dill water'? Can't you put 'Provisions' only? Won't that satisfy the regulations?"

The sending out of his silver identity disc and chain was an agonising experience. On the face of it there is nothing very tragic about a flat bit of silver with a man's name and regiment engraved on it. But what it stands for! Oh, heaven, what it stands for!

I knew what it stood for as I looked at it. It stood first and foremost for the fact that the boy who in himself was all earth and all heaven to me was in the army only one among many thousands—perhaps among many hundreds of thousands. It stood for a fearful confusion in which masses of men might get inextricably mixed up so that none could know who his fellow was; and it stood for a field on which there were many dead lying, and for grim figures walking about among those dead and depending for their identifications on some token worn by the still shapes whose lips would speak no more.

All this passed through my mind while I packed up the little disc and chain. I had had to order a very long chain so that it might slip easily over the Boy's big lion-cub head.

"After all, I'm making too much of it," I told myself. "What is the identity disc but a mere convenience? Haven't I hung one of my own cards on to a button of my dress sometimes in Paris, when I was going to drive about alone in their dangerous cabs?"

And I laughed and went to look for something vulgar to put on the gramophone to cheer myself up.

Since he had gone away we had had no music. We had all been too restless to play the piano and any of the ordinary gramophone records would have brought us memories of him too keen for us to bear. But now suddenly I remembered a dozen records hidden away under a sofa because I had judged them on a first trial to be uninteresting. The Boy had known nothing of them, so they would not torture me with thoughts of him.

With some difficulty I pulled out the uppermost one of the dozen, dusted it and put it on the gramophone.

It was Henschel's "Morning Hymn," sung by Gervase Elwes.

Hurriedly trying the thing in a gay mood many months ago, I had thought it commonplace and dull. I had never taken the trouble even to hear it a second time. The name of the singer had meant nothing to me, because I am too deeply a lover of music ever willingly to go to a concert. I had heard him once or twice in love songs on the gramophone and had been struck in some odd way by the fact that in those love songs it was a gentleman who was pleading and adoring. There is such a difference between a bounder's love song and a gentleman's, even though the bounder may have the best voice that ever came from a masculine throat.

For, just as a man has to be better turned out in personal appearance than a woman in order to look all right, so he has to be better dressed and finished off inside in order not to do things in a shoddy way. For the bounderishness of a bounder betrays itself in every little thing he does—in the way he smiles, the way he comes into a room, the way he takes his overcoat off and puts it on, the way he touches a piano, the very way he breathes and speaks.

So, now, remembering that I had heard Gervase Elwes sing a love song as if the man really cared and not as if he were a florid windbag who would throw the woman off at the first convenient opportunity, I sat down patiently to listen to the "Morning Hymn."

But after the first few moments I started up, amazed and thrilled.

It was not the singer that mattered. It was the music.

I did not know what the words were. I do not know now what they are. But the music was the music of this war.

The room in which I stood faded from before my eyes and in its place I saw a battlefield in the grey dawn light, with the dead lying in hundreds upon it, most of them with their clear-featured, boyish faces upturned to that pitiless daybreak. And among those upturned faces was the face of Little Yeogh Wough—very white, very set, very calm. And over in the east, where the sun would rise, there was a radiance that was not yet of the sun and yet was warmer than the chill grim greyness of the dawn. It was a light shed by the presence of a great Archangel, whose arms, outspread, as it were, upon the clouds, enfolded and blessed the dead as they lay beneath, while his face, uplifted to a higher heaven, besought the pity of the great God of the Universe for the agonies of the nations passing through the awful purgative ordeal of War.

And over all there brooded such an adoration as forced one to one's knees with one's forehead bowed to the ground. And I knew as I looked—I knew even in my own agony—that the things which those boys had suffered and the other things which they had given up had not been suffered and given up in vain.

Oh, what is the use of trying to put the thought of him out of my mind?

It is impossible. Everything I do—everything I touch or look at—reminds me of him.

I took up a casual book of poems and the first lines that I saw brought fresh tears to my heart, if not to my eyes:

"It's no use," I said to myself. "The fear meets me everywhere. It's no good my trying to shirk it. I'll go in and see Mrs. Orme."

Mrs. Orme was an unhappy mother of an only son, who had heard on the night of last Christmas Day the news that her treasure had been taken from her. She had been expecting him home, just as we are expecting Little Yeogh Wough now, and had kept the Christmas dinner waiting until ten o'clock. Then they had gone on with the feast—a veritable feast, prepared for the hero who was expected—and, simply by way of a pretty thought, had lifted their champagne glasses and drunk to the soldiers who had fallen in the war.

Little had they thought that they were drinking to their own idol!

I had not been to the house in all the months that had passed since. I had contented myself with writing a letter of sympathy, not having the courage to go and offer to that poor father and mother comfort that could be no comfort. But now I went and heard the whole pitiful story and was shown the still more pitiful clothes with the bullet holes in them, and the identity disc and the wrist watch and the cigarette case and the periscope and all the other things that the War Office kindly sends back to the homes of fallen officers.

I got away as soon as I could, promising to come again soon and bring the lonely-hearted mother a photograph of my Little Yeogh Wough. I went round with the photograph five days later and told the servant that she need not announce me to Mrs. Orme, as I would go up and find her by myself if, as they said, she was alone in her own sitting-room.

I went very softly along the corridor. The door of the sitting-room looked shut, but yielded to a touch and slipped open. I heard a sound of low sobbing, and looked in.

Mrs. Orme was sitting by a table with her arms flung out across it and her head bowed upon them, with her face hidden. In between the sobs half-smothered words were breaking from her and I caught them:

"Oh, Harry, I'm so poor without you! I'm so poor without you! What's the good of anything, now that you're gone? Oh, Harry, come back to me! Come back to me!"

I went back along the corridor and down the stairs and home.

I would send the photograph by post or by a messenger. Not for the whole world would I have let her know that I had seen her in an hour like this.

But people take their grief differently. One young widow that I knew attacked hers with a fountain pen and got the better of it valiantly by writing screed after screed, not only to her relatives and friends, but even to her remotest acquaintances.

I don't myself think that any letter with deep feeling in it should ever be written with a fountain pen. Love letters should certainly never be written with one. Fountain pens and passion are mutually contradictory.

At just about this time there came a bright gleam in the darkness of our suspense. Captain Jarvice, who had been sent home with a slight shoulder wound three or four weeks before, appeared suddenly in our midst.

"You'll have the Boy home soon on his first leave," he told us. "He's getting on finely out there. He's a born soldier, that boy is, as I've always said. I'm not the only person that says so, either. The colonel says so, too. He's got great brains and great courage both together, and his men know it and will follow him anywhere. You can trust the men to know what an officer is worth."

"I hope he will never get the V.C.," I said with a shiver.

"What?" The dear captain stared at me.

"Oh, you know what I mean! Nobody honours the Victoria Cross more than I do, but it is the military form of Extreme Unction. I want him to do things that deserve it, but not to get it. Only about one man out of every hundred who get it ever lives on safely afterwards. If he doesn't die in the actual winning of it, then the Law of Compensation strikes him a little later, as in the case of Warneford. No! Dearly though I love bravery, I myself am not brave enough to want my Boy to win the Victoria Cross."

"Well, even if he doesn't happen to win it himself, he's pretty sure to be the cause of some other fellow's winning it. I tell you, he's the best soldier in the whole battalion, and if he were to be killed to-morrow without having had the chance to show all the grit that's in him—the chance to hold his trench single-handed against a horde of Germans—he'd still have done so much by his wonderful influence to stiffen up his men that they'd stand like lions, months after he was in his grave, just because of the memory of him. That's the stuff he's made of. As soon as he gets into the trench, with his gay laugh and the Life, sheer Life, breaking out of every pore of him, all the discomforts and difficulties seem to vanish."

"Hasn't he sometimes given way himself?" I asked. "Hasn't he sometimes been very tired and almost broken up?"

"Oh, yes—sometimes! But he never minds being tired himself. It was having to urge the tired men on that hurt him, and having to make them work in the trenches when they ought to have rested. He would like to do half their work for them, if he could; but as he can't, he does the next best thing—he puts heart into them to do it. Oh, he loves his men as much as they love him!"

"He's Mess President, isn't he?"

"I should think he was! And such a cook! He says he's always been fond of cooking, though he's never had much chance to do it. The day before I got hit he made some lovely caper sauce with half a bottle of capers and my tooth-powder. He's a regular schoolboy still; even a troublesome one sometimes."

I laughed.

"I expect you find that he wants to put things to all sorts of uses they were never meant for, don't you?"

"I should just think he does. If a new trench mortar comes along, you'd think it would be just a new trench mortar and there would be an end of it; but that's not so with him. He wants to take it to bits and see if it can't be used for something quite different. But his ideas are sometimes quite good. Two or three months ago, after we'd had a particularly dirty time, he went and got some factory vats and arranged them as baths, and it just happened that the Prime Minister came along unexpectedly when he and two other subalterns were in the vats with nothing whatever on but their identity discs."

I laughed again. Oh, if I could only hear him call out here in this house now, as he had done so often before:

"Father, can I have a hot bath?"

"You've no idea what a comfort a good wash is when you're thoroughly tired out and caked with filthy mud from head to foot," Captain Jarvice went on.

Yes, I had an idea. I was thinking how tenderly I would bathe the tired feet of Little Yeogh Wough if I were near him now after his long marches; those feet that I had kissed so often when they were the feet of a small child.

And again I feel so glad that he had such a happy childhood. My own people used to say that it was a waste to buy the children the extravagantly costly toys they had. But I'm glad now—very glad.

"He'll be adjutant presently, you'll see," said Captain Jarvice, keeping on his own line.

I laid my hand very softly against his wounded shoulder.

"Captain Jarvice, can't you see that in spite of all its horror this war has done some good? It has made men and women of us all. You don't hear people complaining of pin-pricks now, as they used to do. And it has given us all hearts, instead of only a gizzard in the heart's place."

A week or two later Little Yeogh Wough himself came home on that first leave to which his father and his sister and his naval cadet brother and I had been looking forward with such panting eagerness.

"Why, you look like a German, Roland!" was the frank greeting of that younger brother, standing up in the hall to welcome him with all the self-confidence of one who wore the dark blue of the premier Service.

"I do, do I? That's because I've got my hair cropped, I suppose. And I expect you think a lot of yourself because you've got into the Navy. But anyhow, here I am, and I'm not a German, whatever I may look like."

With his arm round me and mine round him, he moved across the hall, giving his gay little greetings that had a catch in the throat behind them. There was an answering catch in his father's throat, and a little tremble in all our voices. Then we noticed at last how deadly tired out he looked. He laughed when we told him of it.

"I've been on my feet for forty-eight hours—and in any case I never manage to get more than four hours' sleep a night, even in billets. But a good sleep here to-night will soon put me right. I think I'll have a hot bath now and go to bed directly after dinner. You'll come and see me in bed, mother?"

We had dinner early, for his sake, and it was hardly more than half-past nine when he called me and told me he was ready for me to come in.

He was not in bed yet, however, but only sitting down, half undressed, in the midst of all the disturbed treasures of his room. The doors and drawers of his wardrobe stood open, as did also the drawers under his toilet glass, and one or two trunks which he had pulled out from beneath the bed.

"It's very good to be back again and see all the dear old things." He nodded at the general confusion. "You don't know how I think of them when I'm out there."

"But you don't hate being out there?"

"No. Because I'm in the right place. It's my duty to be there. I should hate myself if I were not there. You wouldn't have me anywhere else, would you?"

"No, Little Yeogh Wough, I wouldn't have you anywhere else. I couldn't have the boy who has been the pride of my life anywhere else now but in the fighting line. I am so proud of you, because I know you are a splendid soldier. To be adjutant at your age—why, it's wonderful!"

He glanced half backward at me, smiling. Something in his eye startled me.

"Roland! Do you know that you looked almost wild at that moment?"

"Did I? I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've unlearned a lot of civilisation. I've thrown over a lot of prejudices, too. I've come to have a great respect for the Colonials. I always did think a heap of the Canadians, but still not enough. And I used to think the Australians a touchy people, but now I know they're not. Oh, I'm a different boy in some ways from the boy who went out, Big Yeogh Wough!... What have you been writing out those lines of Laurence Binyon's for?"

He had caught sight of my large black handwriting on a sheet of paper lying on his table.

"Oh, those lines from the 'Dirge for the Dead'? I copied them out of your book this morning to send in to Mrs. Orme, to comfort her about poor Harry. I forgot them."

Little Yeogh Wough read the lines aloud, very softly:

I slipped to my knees beside him and laid my head against his shoulder.

"Would they comfort you if I were to be killed?" he asked.

"Yes, they would—as much as anything could."

His eyes looked into mine curiously.

"What will you think in the years to come if I go down in this war, Big Yeogh Wough?"

"What shall I think? Well, first of all, I shall be proud. I shall honour you very much—more than if you had lived to make yourself a king. But, just because you are you, I shall think it is a waste unless you get your death in doing a little more than an ordinary man would do. Look at your muscular body! I've thought of the wonder of it ever since the day when I first saw you boxing. What's the good of it in this war? It's no more good to resist flying bullets or shell splinters than an old tottering man's body. That's where I should feel bitter. These times are women's times and this war of machinery might as well be carried on by women, for all the good that male muscle can do in it. And yet they go and take the pick of the boys and let a stray bit of shell finish off in a second a splendid human creature whose mind might have been the driving force of the nation in a few years to come! That's where the pity of it would be if anything happened to you."

"But nothing is going to happen to me. You forget my lucky lock."

He lifted my hand and guided it to the curious little white patch at the side of his cropped head.

"You forget, too, that the fellow at school who knew all about palmistry told me he was sure I was not going to get killed till I was close on sixty. So, you see, I shall be quite safe in this war. They're not likely to add one more to the noonday strokes of the old School bell for me."

"The strokes of the old School bell? What do you mean?"

"Oh! Haven't you heard? The School bell tolls once at noon every day for every Old Boy who has lost his life in this war. They've got up to fifty-two strokes already and it's sure to go mounting up now by leaps and bounds. There are so many of us out there fighting."

Again I was struck by his tired-out look. I drew myself from his hold and got up from my knees.

"You must go to bed now," I told him. "I will go away for ten minutes and when I come back I must find you in bed."

He obeyed me as he had obeyed me when he was a child. I heard a great noise of shutting doors and drawers and box lids, and when I went in, exactly at the end of the ten minutes, he was lying between the sheets, luxuriously stretched out.

"Oh, the joy of being in a real bed again! I expect I shall sleep till eleven or twelve o'clock to-morrow. Then I shall have the rest of the day with you and shall go up to town and meet Vera Brennan next day; that is, if she can come up from her home. I want to buy a dagger, too, for hand-to-hand work in the trenches, and a few other things."

"Oughtn't you to have sent Vera a telegram to-night?"

"No. To-morrow will do. Oh, by the way, Big Yeogh Wough, have you got any new clothes to show me?"

"No." I laughed as I shook my head. "I couldn't have afforded them now in war time, even if I'd wanted them—and I haven't felt I wanted them with you away and in danger."

He drew my hand into his, and I stayed beside him with my head resting on his pillow, until he had fallen into a heavy sleep.

How boyish his face looked as he slept! and as I drew my hand from his and moved away from his bedside, turning off the electric light and leaving him in a full flood of August moon radiance, I could have fancied that I heard voices singing softly in the air around me:

I stole back and kissed his hair. Oh, human love! why must it be always pain—pain—pain?

He was his old bright self again next day, when, having walked with us all, he lay across my bed and laughed as he read me little French fairy stories while I put things straight in the room.

"It's like the old days, isn't it, when you used to lie across my bed and I taught you French while I brushed my hair? That reminds me that I met an officer last week who said he'd heard you were amazingly good at getting what you wanted out of the French farmer people round about you. He was a man of quite thirty-five, by the way, and I asked him if he didn't think he ought to marry before he went back to the Front. And what do you think he answered me? He rubbed his fingers through his hair, and reddened and said: 'Well, I've always been fonder of outdoor amusements.' So, you see, falling in love and getting married are indoor amusements. I suppose they are, really—only it sounded very funny."

"Oh, by the way, Big Yeogh Wough, can't you telephone up North to Vera Brennan's people to-morrow and ask them to let her come here till Monday? Say you'll be going up yourself with her and me on Monday."

"Are you getting fonder of her?"

"I don't know. I shan't know till I see her again. There's only one thing I do know and that is that absence never makes the heart grow fonder. I should like to ram that proverb down the throat of the man who invented it."

So the girl with the amethyst eyes came down to our house by the eastern sea.

There was only Sunday for her, since she came late on Saturday evening and we were all going up to London on Monday morning. But that Sunday was enjoyed to the uttermost.

It was so strange to see Little Yeogh Wough with her! No wonder his sister and his young brother looked on in frank bewilderment, remembering that he had been simply a masterful schoolboy until the time of his putting on together of khaki and a moustache!

What a forcing power this war is! It changes people's ages as it changes their addresses, and that is saying a great deal.

At twelve o'clock that night I rose from the big old sofa where I had been sitting with the Boy and Vera Brennan, and said to them both:

"It is time we all went to bed now. That early train in the morning is really very inconveniently early, as you will find out."

The two of them looked at me and then at each other. Then the Boy laughed.

"You know, Vera, it's not a bit late for us in this house. Two o'clock is more like our time. But I'll go to bed, anyhow, and you can stay here and say what you want to say."

He was gone before I could say a word. And I was left alone with the girl with the amethyst eyes.

I got up from the sofa and walked up and down the room. It was a handsome room, large, many-windowed and high, but strangely gloomy. The electric light was so heavily shaded that there were grim corners. One might have thought that the wings of the Dark Angel hovered in the recesses, as he waited—waited—waited. And, though the month was August, there came up from the sea, hardly more than a stone's-throw away, a sobbing that had something so much like human grief in it that it made one understand how it was that in the ominous spring of 1914 the village people of Russia kept on saying that they heard the earth crying and that there would be war.

Vera Brennan's small head had sunk lower and lower. She spoke to me without looking at me:

"You know I love Roland, don't you?"

"Yes," I answered her. "I know you love him."

"I can't help it," she said almost piteously. "I never loved anyone before. I never thought I should love anyone at all. My mind was all on other things. But he woke me up. I loved him directly I saw him and heard him speak. Of course, I know he's very young, but with him age doesn't seem to matter. He's a grown man in his mind and heart. He's everything to me now—everything."

I said nothing, but kept on walking up and down the room. She went on, more and more appealingly:

"He knows I'm saying all this to you. You see, he's told me all about you. He said that if I loved him I must love you, too, because you and he were like one life. And that is why I want to say this to you—that I love him so very much that I want to think of him more than of myself—that, if you think it would be better for him that I should give him up and all my own life's happiness with him, I can do it and I will do it. Yes, I will find strength to do it—if you say I must."

She had stretched out her arms towards me from the deeper gloom in which she sat. And suddenly I realised, that, small and flowerlike and fragile though she was, she was not a girl who was going to take my treasure from me, but a woman who was asking me to let her share with me the pride and the anguish of living under the black shadow of Fear that had darkened my life for four months past.

I turned and went to her quickly and sat down on the sofa beside her and took her into my arms. We did not speak a word, but we stayed there like that for a long, long time—until the Boy's voice suddenly startled us:

"What are you doing here all this time? It's three o'clock. You will both be ill."

"Roland! I thought you were in bed and asleep."

"No. I tried to lie down, but I couldn't. I've been walking up and down the corridor."

He was stooping over us both, drawing us up. His boyish face had become suddenly the face of a man, his voice was the voice of a man, and his touch and his manner had a man's power and a man's dignity.

It was nearly four o'clock when I went to say good-night to him.

The next day in London was like a dream in which things happened with the speed of flashes. It was only at midnight that the Boy and I got any private talk together. His room adjoined mine at the hotel where we were staying for the night, and he came in to me to bring me an offering of sulphur carnations and to show me the dagger he had bought and his miraculously tiny medical outfit.

"Why were you so late for the dinner?" I asked him. For he and I had had a dinner engagement and he had kept dinner waiting for at least an hour.

"I didn't feel I could go anywhere and smile and talk to people who didn't understand, just after seeing Vera off at Euston. I should have liked to come straight back to you and talk to you quietly all the evening. Look here, let me fasten these carnations on you where I want you to wear them, just as I used to do before the war!"

"But I shall be going to bed in half an hour!"

"That doesn't matter. It's worth while for you to wear them for half an hour. Tell me what you think of the dagger. It's for hand-to-hand work in the trenches, where there isn't room to use a bayonet."

"Ah!" I took the newly bought thing in my hand and looked at it. "When it's done its work bring it back to me without cleaning it. I shall want to keep it always like that."

"And here's my little medicine chest. Don't they make things up splendidly? Here's some morphia. You see, many a fellow that's not very badly wounded does himself a lot of harm by wriggling about in his pain before he's picked up. Now, if you've got morphia, you can make the pain bearable and keep quiet."

"Yes," I said quite brightly. But I felt curiously sick at heart.

"Do you still feel you would rather I did not come to Victoria to see you off to-morrow?" I asked him when we said good-night.

"Yes. I don't feel I could stand it. You know, I've always been like that. I've never wanted people who really mattered to see me off at a station. Other people don't count. They can come in crowds. But not you. It'll be hard enough to go, anyhow."

"Very well, then, we'll have lunch at Almond's, with that dear Russian friend I want to show you off to, and then you can do the rest of your shopping while I go and keep a business appointment in Farringdon Street. I shall be back here to say good-bye to you at four o'clock."

But the business appointment next day in Farringdon Street kept me longer than I had expected it would do and when I came out I could not get a taxicab easily. Agitated, desperate, I had almost run well on to the Embankment before I picked one up and then I dashed up to the hotel steps to find the boy jumping in and out of his own cab with a harassed look on his face.

"If I stay another minute I shall be too late," he said.

There was no time for me to explain. One moment's clasp of hands—one quick, yet clinging, kiss—and he was gone!

Gone from me again—back to fight in France!

I stood looking straight before me with an odd feeling as if I were turning to stone. Why had I not thought of getting into the cab and driving to Victoria with him, without going on to the platform?

What a miserable good-bye I had had—I, who should have had the tenderest!

Yesterday morning, when we had left home, his good-bye to his sister and to the naval cadet had been sweet. He had leaned out of the railway carriage window looking with misty eyes at his father still standing on the platform of the East Coast town station, and had said to Vera and to me:

"Dear father! I haven't been half good enough to him."

And I—I had had to part from him, through no fault of his or mine, as if we were going to meet again in a few hours!

It is strange how vividly all these pictures of his whole past life have flashed across my mind again as I have been sitting here waiting for him!

It is four months since he went away that day after only that quick, unsatisfying kiss.

"I will take care to have a better good-bye when this second leave is over," I told myself aloud. "Only six days, including the travelling! But I don't suppose they can spare the officers for any longer."

He is certainly very late. It is beginning to look as if he will not come till to-morrow morning. The weather may be bad in the Channel. Anyhow, we shall have to go on with dinner.

I hear a noise of the opening and shutting of doors.

I start to my feet.

This is he! This must be he!

But two or three moments pass and he does not come into the room. And something new and strange and heavy has come into the air of the house; or so, at least, I fancy.

My husband comes along. There is something very odd about his step. And his face looks changed, somehow; sharpened in feature and greyish white.

"How true it is that electric light sometimes makes people look a dreadful colour!" I think as he comes nearer to me.

I ran forward then to meet him.

"Where is Roland? Isn't he here? I thought I heard him come."

And then for the first time I noticed that the boy's father had a bit of pinkish paper crushed up in his hand.

"Is that a telegram?" I cried eagerly, putting out my own hand. "Oh, give it to me! What does it say? Isn't he coming to-night?"

One of my husband's arms was put quietly around me.

"No. It's no good our waiting for him any longer. He'll never come any more. He's dead. He was badly wounded on Wednesday at midnight, and he died on Thursday."

For minutes that were like years the world became to me a shapeless horror of greyness in which there was no beginning and no end, no light and no sound. I did not know anything except that I had to put out my hand and catch at something, with an animal instinct to steady myself so that I might not fall. And then, through the rolling, blinding waves of mist, there came to me suddenly the old childish cry:

"Come and see me in bed, mother!"

And I heard myself answering aloud:

"Yes, boy of my heart, I will come. As soon as the war is over I will come and see you in bed—in your bed under French grass. And I will say good-night to you—there—kneeling by your side—as I've always done."

THE END

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