e; but Brian they
worship as a supernatural being. Mr. Beckett says he's saved them from
themselves, and given them an incentive to live. It was only yesterday
that they answered my S. O. S. call. Now, the immediate future is
settled, for the four of us; settled for us _together_.

Father Beckett is asking leave to travel _en automobile_ through the
liberated lands. In each town and village Jim's parents will decide on
some work of charity or reconstruction in his memory, above all in
places he knew and loved. They can identify these by the letters he
wrote home from France before the war. His mother has kept every one.
Through a presentiment of his death, or because she couldn't part from
them, she has brought along a budget of Jim's letters from America. She
carries them about in a little morocco hand-bag, as other women carry
their jewels.

The thought of Brian's plan is for the two old people like an infusion
of blood in emptied veins. They say that they would never have thought
of it themselves, and if they had, they would not have ventured to
attempt it alone, ignorant of French as they are. But this is their
generous way of making us feel indispensable! They tell us we are needed
to "see them through"; that without our help and advice they would be
lost. Every word of kindness is a new stab for me. Shall I grow callous
as time goes on, and accept everything as though I really were what they
call me--their "daughter"? Or--I begin to think of another alternative.
I'll turn to it if I grow desperate.

The bright spot in my darkness is the joyful change in the Becketts.
They feel that they've regained their son; that Jim will be with them on
their journey, and that they've a rendezvous with him at "_his_
chateau," when they reach the journey's end. They owe this happiness not
to me, but to Brian. As for him, he has the air of calm content that
used to enfold him when he packed his easel and knapsack for a tramp.
Blindness isn't blindness for Brian. It's only another kind of sight.

"I shan't see the wreck and misery you others will have to see," he
says. "Horrors don't exist any more for my eyes. I shall see the country
in all its beauty as it was before the war. And who knows but I shall
find my dog?" (Brian lost the most wonderful dog in the world when he
was wounded.) He is always hoping to find it again!

He doesn't feel that he accepts charity from the Becketts. He believes,
with a kind of modest pride, tha