nd him at the Ritz. Instead, we found
news that he had fallen in his first battle."

The interviewer went on, upon his own account, to praise "Jimmy"
Beckett. He described him as a young man of twenty-seven, "of singularly
engaging manner and handsome appearance; a graduate with high honours
from Harvard, an all-round sportsman and popular with a large circle of
friends, but fortunately leaving neither a wife nor a fiancee behind him
in America." The newly qualified aviator had, indeed, fallen in his
first battle: but according to the writer it had been a battle of
astonishing glory for a beginner. Single-handed he had engaged four
enemy machines, manoeuvring his own little Nieuport in a way to excite
the highest admiration and even surprise in all spectators. Two out of
the four German 'planes he had brought down over the French lines; and
was in chase of the third, flying low above the German trenches, when
two new Fokkers appeared on the scene and attacked him. His plane
crashed to earth in flames, and a short time after, prisoners had
brought news of his death.

"Mr. and Mrs. James W. Beckett will have the sympathy of all Europe as
well as their native land, in these tragic circumstances," the
journalist ended his story with a final flourish. "If such grief could
be assuaged, pride in the gallant death of their gallant son might be a
panacea."

"As if you could make pride into a balm for broken hearts!" I said to
myself in scorn of this flowery eloquence. For a few minutes I forgot my
own plight to pity these people whom I had never seen. The Paris _Daily
Messenger_ slid off my lap on to the floor, and dropped with the back
page up. When I had glanced toward the bed, and seen that Brian still
slept, my eyes fell on the paper again. The top part of the last page is
always devoted to military snapshots, and a face smiled up at me from
it--a face I had seen once and never forgotten.

My heart gave a jump, Padre, because the one tiny, abbreviated
dream-romance of my life came from the original of that photograph.
Although the man I knew (if people can know each other in a day's
acquaintance) had been _en civile_, and this one was in aviator's
uniform, I was sure they were the same. And even before I'd snatched up
the paper to read what was printed under the picture, something--the
wonderful inner Something that's never wrong--told me I was looking at a
portrait of Jimmy Beckett.

CHAPTER II

I never ment