ever regret it, no matter what came to them. No man
will, that's done his duty. It's the slackers who couldn't or
wouldn't see their duty men should feel sorry for! It's not the lads
who gave everything and made the final sacrifice.

It was hard for me to go on with my work of making folks laugh. It
had been growing harder steadily ever since I had come home from
America and that long voyage of mine to Australia and had seen what
war was and what it was doing to Britain. But I carried on, and did
the best I could.

That winter I was in the big revue at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in
London, that was called "Three Cheers." It was one of the gay shows
that London liked because it gave some relief from the war and made
the Zeppelin raids that the Huns were beginning to make so often now
a little easier to bear. And it was a great place for the men who
were back from France. It was partly because of them that I could go
on as I did. We owed them all we could give them. And when they came
back from the mud and the grime and the dreariness of the trenches,
they needed something to cheer them up--needed the sort of production
we gave them. A man who has two days' leave in London does not want
to see a serious play or a problem drama, as a rule. He wants
something light, with lots of pretty girls and jolly tunes and people
to make him laugh. And we gave him that. The house was full of
officers and men, night after night.

Soon word came from John that he was to have leave, just after
Christmas, that would bring him home for the New Year's holidays. His
mother went home to make things ready, for John was to be married
when he got his leave. I had my plans all made. I meant to build a
wee hoose for the two of them, near our own hoose at Dunoon, so that
we might be all together, even though my laddie was in a home of his
own. And I counted the hours and the days against the time when John
would be home again.

While we were playing at the Shaftesbury I lived at an hotel in
Southampton Row called the Bonnington. But it was lonely for me
there. On New Year's Eve--it fell on a Sunday--Tom Vallance, my
brother-in-law, asked me to tea with him and his family in Clapham,
where he lived. That is a pleasant place, a suburb of London on the
southwest, and I was glad to go. And so I drove out with a friend of
mine, in a taxicab, and was glad to get out of the crowded part of
the city for a time.

I did not feel right that day. Holiday t