"Perhaps to-night, son, when you are in bed—just before mother says good-night—we'll see. But look! there is the city, fading, fading." Then after a short silence: "There, Graham, it has gone."
"But isn't that it 'way over there, mother?" persisted the boy. "I see the sun shining on the roofs."
Mrs. Lysle shook her head. "No, dearie; that is the snow on the mountain peaks. The city has—gone."
But far into the twilight she yet stood watching the purple sea, the dove-gray coast. Her world was with her—the man she had chosen for her life partner, and the little boy that belonged to them both—but there are times even in the life of a wife and mother when her soul rebels at cutting herself off from her womenkind, and all that environment of social life among women means, even if the act itself is voluntary on her part. It was a relief, then, from her rather sombre musing at the ship's rail, when the major lightly placed both hands on her shoulders and said, "Grahamie has toddled off to the stateroom. The sea air is weighting down his eyelids."
"Sea air?" laughed Mrs. Lysle. "Don't you believe it, Horace. The young monkey had been just scampering about the deck with the men until his little legs are tired out. I'm half afraid our 'Mounted' boys bid fair to spoil him. I'll go to him, for I promised him a story to-night."
"Which you would rather perish than not tell him, if you promised," smiled the major. "You govern that boy the same way I do my men, eh, dear?"
"It's the only way to govern boys or soldiers," she laughed back from the head of the companionway. "Then both boy and soldier will keep their promises to you."
The Major watched her go below, then said to himself, "She's right—she's always right. She was right to come north, and bring him, too. But I am a coward, for I daren't tell her she'll have to part from him, or from me, some day. He will have to be sent to the front again; he can't grow up unlearned, untaught, and there are no schools in our Arctic world, and she must go with him, or stay with me; but I can't tell her. Yes, I'm a coward." But Major Lysle was the only person in all the world who would have thought or said so.
"And will you tell me how Sergeant Black won his stripes, mother, before I go to sleep?" begged Graham.
"Yes, little 'North-West,'" she replied, using the pet name the men in barracks frequently called the child. "It's just a wee story of one man fighting it out alone—just alone, single-handed—with no reinforcements but his own courage, his own self-reliance."