e how it looks.

"P.S.2. How is my soldier boy getting along? Poor kid! I expect he is
finding it a lot different from Broadway with money in your pocket."

About this time the Weeping Scion was finding things very different,
indeed, from Broadway, having been shifted to a specially wet and muddy
section of France; and was taking them as he found them. That is to say,
he had learned the prime lesson of war.

"And he's been made corporal," announced the Little Red Doctor with
satisfaction.

"That sounds encouraging," remarked the Bonnie Lassie. "How did it
happen?"

"He went over on one of the 'flu ships,' and when the epidemic began to
mow 'em down there was a kind of panic. From what I can make out, the
Scion kept his head and his nerve, and made good. A corporal's stripes
aren't much, but they're something."

Better was to come. There was high triumph in the Little Red Doctor's
expression when he came to my bench with the glad tidings of young
David's promotion to a sergeantcy.

"While it's very gratifying," I remarked, "it doesn't seem to me an
epoch-making event."

"Doesn't it!" retorted my friend. "That's because of your abysmal
military ignorance, Dominie. Let me tell you how it is in our army. A
fellow can get himself made a captain by pull, or a major by luck, or a
colonel by desk-work, or a general by having a fine martial figure, but
to get yourself made a sergeant, by Gosh, you've got to show the
_stuff_. You've got to be a _man_. You've got to have--"

"Are you going to tell her?" interrupted the Bonnie Lassie who had been
sent for to share the news.

The Little Red Doctor fell suddenly grave. "She's another matter," he
said. "I don't think I shall."

Matters were going forward with Mayme--beg her pardon, Mary McCartney,
too.

"Better and more of it," she wrote the Bonnie Lassie. "They rang me in
on one of their local Red Cross shows to do a monologue. Was I a hit?
Say, I got more flowers than a hearse! You've got to remember, though,
that they deliver flowers by the car-load out here. And the local stock
company has made me an offer. Ingenue parts. There is not the money that
I might get in the pictures, but the chance is better. So Marie
Courtenay moves on to the legit.--I mean the spoken drama. Look out for
me on Broadway later!"

In the correspondence from Sergeant Berthelin there came a long hiatus
followed by a curt bit of official information: "Seriously wounded." The
Little Red Doct