socks and a lot of things when I get over there. I shall write
you all about it, and you will write me. Won't you?" Again Elfie nodded.

"I am glad you let me cry," she said. "I was so hot and sore here," and
she laid her hands upon her throat. "And I am glad you cried too, Larry;
and I won't cry before people, you know."

"That is right. There are going to be too many sad people about for us
to go crying and making them feel worse," said Larry.

"But I will say good-bye here, Larry. I could go to the train, but then
I might not quite smile."

But when the train pulled out that night the last face that Larry saw of
all his warm-hearted American friends was that of the little girl, who
stood alone at the end of the platform, waving both her hands wildly
over her head, her pale face effulgent with a glorious smile, through
which the tears ran unheeded down her cheeks like rain on a sunny day.
And on Larry's face, as he turned away, there was the same gleam of
sunshine and of rain.

"This farewell business is something too fierce," he said to himself
savagely, thinking with a sinking heart of the little group at Wolf
Willow in the West to whom he must say farewell, and of the one he must
leave behind in Winnipeg. "How do these women send their husbands off
and their sons? God knows, it is beyond me."

Throughout the train journey to Calgary his mind was chiefly occupied
with the thought of the parting that awaited him. But when he reached
his destination he found himself so overwhelmed with the rush of
preparation and with the strenuous daily grind of training that he had
no time nor energy left for anything but his work. A change, too, was
coming swiftly over the heart of Canada and over his own heart. The
tales of Belgian atrocities, at first rejected as impossible, but
afterwards confirmed by the Bryce Commission and by many private
letters, kindled in Canadian hearts a passion of furious longing to wipe
from the face of the earth a system that produced such horrors. Women
who, with instincts native of their kind, had at the first sought how
they might with honour keep back their men from the perils of war, now
in their compassion for women thus relentlessly outraged and for their
tender babes pitilessly mangled, consulted chiefly how they might best
fit their men for the high and holy mission of justice for the wronged
and protection for the helpless. It was this that wrought in Larry
a fury of devotion to his du