Jackson, Lieut. P., 3rd Lancashires (husband of Mabel Irving).
Keary, Private P. L., Irish Brigade (brother of Eileen Keary).
Preston, Private H., West Yorks (brother of Kathleen and Joyce Preston).
Marjorie stopped suddenly. Private Preston—the humorous dark-eyed young soldier whose acquaintance she had made in the train, and renewed in the Red Cross Hospital. Surely it could not be he! Alas! it was only too plain. She knew he was the brother of Kathleen and Joyce Preston, for he had himself mentioned that his sisters used to be at Brackenfield. Also he was certainly in the West Yorkshire regiment. This bright, strong, clever, capable young life sacrificed! Marjorie felt as if she had received a personal blow. Oh, the war was cruel—cruel! Death was picking England's fairest flowers indeed. A certain chapter in her life, which had seemed to promise many very sweet hopes, was now for ever closed.
"They might have put his V.C. on the list," she said to herself. "I wish I knew where he's buried. I shall never forget him—though I only saw him twice. He was quite different from anyone else I've ever met."
Somehow Marjorie did not feel capable of mentioning Private Preston to anybody, even to Dona. She had kept the little newspaper photograph of him which had been cut out of the Onlooker, when he won his V.C. She enclosed it in an envelope and put it within the leaves of her Bible. That seemed the most appropriate place for it. She could not leave it amongst the portraits of her other war heroes, for fear her room-mates might refer to it. To discuss him now with Betty or Sylvia would be a desecration. His death was a wound that would not bear handling. For some days afterwards she was unusually quiet. The girls thought she was fretting about her brother, and tried to cheer her up, for Larry's bulletins were excellent, and he seemed to be making a wonderful recovery.
"He is to leave the military hospital in a fortnight," wrote Mrs. Anderson, "and be transferred to a Red Cross hospital. We are using all our influence to get him sent to Whitecliffe, where Aunt Ellinor and Elaine could specially look after him."
To have Larry at Whitecliffe would indeed be a cause for rejoicing. Marjorie could picture the spoiling he would receive at the Red Cross Hospital. She wondered if he would have the same bed that had been occupied by Private Preston. It was No. 17, she remembered. "One shall be taken, and the other left," she thought. For Larry there was the glad welcome and the nursing back to life and health, and for that other brave boy a grave in a foreign land. Some lines from a little volume of verses flashed to her memory. They had struck her attention only a week before, and she had learnt them by heart.
"For us—
The parting and the sorrow;
For him—
'God speed!'
One fight,—
A noble deed,—
'Good-night!'
And no to-morrow.
Where he is,
In Thy Peace
Time is not,
Nor smallest sorrow."
Marjorie was almost glad that on her next exeat at The Tamarisks Elaine was away from home. She was afraid her cousin might speak of Private Preston, and she did not wish to mention his name again.