won't wonder--" There was a little choke in the young voice. "I
see it now--"

"I think you understand, Patsy, and you are a little brick," said
Captain Jack in a low, hurried tone. "And I am going to try. Anyway,
whatever happens, we will be pals."

The girl caught his arm tight in her clasped hands and in a low voice
she said, "Always and always, Captain Jack, and evermore." And till they
drew up at the Rectory door no more was said.

Maitland drove homeward through the mellow autumn evening with a warmer,
kindlier glow in his heart than he had known through all the dreary
weeks that had followed his return from the war. For the war had wrought
desolation for him in a home once rich in the things that make life
worth while, by taking from it his mother, whose rare soul qualities had
won and held through her life the love, the passionate, adoring love
of her sons, and his twin brother, the comrade, chum, friend of all his
days, with whose life his own had grown into a complete and ideal
unity, deprived of whom his life was left like a body from whose raw and
quivering flesh one-half had been torn away.

The war had left his life otherwise bruised and maimed in ways known
only to himself.

Returning thus from his soul-devastating experience of war to find
his life desolate and maimed in all that gave it value, he made the
appalling discovery that he was left almost alone of all whom he had
known and loved in past days. For of his close friends none were left
as before. For the most part they were lying on one or other of the five
battle fronts of the war. Others had found service in other spheres.
Only one was still in his home town, poor old Phil Amory, Frances'
brother, half-blind in his darkened room, but to bring anything of his
own heart burden to that brave soul seemed sacrilege or worse. True
enough, he was passing through the new and thrilling experience of
making acquaintance with his father. But old Grant Maitland was a hard
man to know, and they were too much alike in their reserve and in their
poverty of self-expression to make mutual acquaintance anything but a
slow and in some ways a painful process.

Hence in Maitland's heart there was an almost extravagant gratitude
toward this young generous-hearted girl whose touch had thrilled
his heart and whose voice with its passionate note of loyal and
understanding comradeship still sang like music in his soul, "Always and
always, Captain Jack, and evermor