softly and stood looking from a distance. Then
coming to the bedside, she laid her hand upon the head and then the
heart of the dead man. Then she drew back, and beckoning to an orderly,
they placed a screen about the cot. She let her eyes rest for a moment
or two upon the kneeling boy, then went softly away.

Death was to her an all too familiar thing. She had often seen it
unmoved, but to-night, as she walked away, the brown eyes could not hold
their tears.

CHAPTER XII

A MAN OF GOD

Barry was standing beside his father's grave, in a little plot in the
Boulogne cemetery set apart for British officers. They had, one by one,
gone away and left him until, alone, he stood looking down on the simple
wooden cross on which were recorded the name, age, and unit of the
soldier with the date of his death, and underneath the simple legend,
eloquent of heroic sacrifice, "Died of wounds received in action."

Throughout the simple, beautiful burial service he had not been acutely
conscious of grief. Even now he wondered that he could shed no tears.
Rather did an exultant emotion fill his soul as he looked around upon
the little British plot, with its rows of crosses, and he was chiefly
conscious of a solemn, tender pride that he was permitted to share that
glorious offering which his Empire was making for the saving of the
world. But, in this moment, as he stood there alone close to his
father's grave, and surrounded by those examples of high courage and
devotion, he became aware of a mighty change wrought in him during these
last three days. He had experienced a veritable emancipation of soul. He
was as if he had been born anew.

The old sense of failure in his work, the feeling of unfitness for it,
and the old dread of it, had been lifted out of his soul, and not only
was he a new man, but he felt himself to be charged with a new mission,
because he had a new message for his men. No longer did he conceive
himself as a moral policeman or religious censor, whose main duty it
was to stand in judgment over the faults and sins of the men of
his battalion. No more would the burden of his message be a stern
denunciation of these faults and sins. Standing there to-day, he could
only wonder at his former blindness and stupidity and pride.

"Who am I," he said in bitter self-humiliation, "that I should judge my
comrades? How little I knew myself."

"A man of God," his superintendent had said in his last letter to him.
Yes,