n?"

"You carry on an' kiss Auntie," replied his friend, and applied himself
to his fiancee's pretty upturned mouth. This the chum promptly did,
following up the coup, amid hysterical laughter and face-slapping, by
swiftly embracing the mother and sisters.

"You sailors!" said the friend's mother delightedly, straightening her
hat.

"Don Jewans, all of 'em," confirmed the aunt, recovering the power of
speech of which a temporary displacement of false teeth had robbed her.
"Glad there wasn't no sailors down our way when I was a girl, or I
shouldn't be 'ere now." A sally greeted by renewed merriment.

Indifferent to the laughter and horse-play near them a grave-faced Petty
Officer stood by the door of his carriage saying good-bye to his wife and
children before returning to another nine months' exile. A little boy in
a sailor-suit clung to the woman's skirt and gazed admiringly into the
face of the man he had been taught to call "Daddie"--the jovial visitor
who came to stay with them for a week once a year or so, after whose
departure his mother always cried so bitterly, writer of the letters she
pressed against her cheek and locked away in the yellow tin box under the
bed....

She held another child in her arms--a wide-eyed mite that stared up into
the murk overhead with preternatural solemnity. Their talk, of an
inarticulate simplicity, is no concern of ours. The little group has
been recorded because of the woman. Mechanically rocking the child in
her arms, with her neat clothes and brave little bits of finery, with,
above all, her anxious, pathetic smile as she looked up into the face of
her man, she stood there for a symbol of all that the warring Navy
demands of its women-folk.

Beyond them, where the first-class carriages and sleeping saloons began,
the platform became quieter and less crowded. Several Naval and one or
two Military officers walked to and fro, or stood at the doors of their
compartments superintending the stowage of their luggage; a little way
back from the light thrown from the carriage windows, two figures, a man
and a girl, stood talking in low voices.

Presently the man stepped under one of the overhanging lamps and
consulted his wristwatch. The light of the arc-lamp, falling on the
shoulder-straps of his uniform great-coat, indicated his rank, which was
that of Lieutenant-Commander.

"We've got five minutes more," he said.

The girl nodded.

"I know. I've been ticking off