hope and prayer and
faith and pride--of careful teaching and utter trust--that it should
come to this, that the boy on whom his great heart was centered should
after all--after all prove a coward and a liar! His eyes seemed clouded.
He saw only as through a lurid glass. The sunlight in the crisp,
delicious air was clear as crystal, yet there was a blur that seemed to
overshadow every object. There was a ringing in his ears that dulled the
sweet strains of the song his wife, his own wife, his love, his
treasure, Jimmy's mother, used to sing, for now he never heard it. His
temples throbbed; his head seemed burning, yet the face was ashen. The
twitching lips, bitten into gashes, were blue between the savage teeth
marks, and yet at sight of the straight, soldierly form he loved, little
Jim had quit his fellows and, to the music of his mother's song--just as
of old, beaming, joyous, confident, brimming over with fun and
health--had come bounding to meet him.

It had been the father's way at such times to halt, to bend forward with
outstretched arms, almost as he had done in Jimmy's earliest toddling
baby boyhood, but he never halted now. Erect and stern he moved straight
on. It was the boy who suddenly faltered, whose fond, happy, radiant
face grew suddenly white and seemed to cloud with dread, whose eager
bounding ceased as he neared his sire, and, though the hands as of old
went forth to clasp the hand that never yet had failed them, for the
first time in his glad young life Jimmy Dwight looked in vain for the
love and welcome that had ever been his, for the first time his brave
young heart well-nigh ceased its beating, for the first time he seemed
to shrink from his father's gaze.

And in fear, too, but not for himself; oh, never for himself! Vaguely,
strangely, of late he had begun to feel that all was not well with the
father he so loved, and now the look in his father's face was terrible.
"Oh, daddy!" he cried, a great sob welling up in his throat, but the
answering word checked him instantly, checked his anxious query, turned
his dread at the instant into relief, almost into joy. It was not then
that his father was ill and stricken. It was that he was angry--angry,
and at him, and in the flash of a second, in that one hoarse
word--"Home!" he knew what it must be, and though his lips quivered and
his eyes filled and again the sobs came surging from his breast, just as
of old, all confidence that his word could not be