"Well, sir," answered the boy, with that shyness which we all have come to know in the boys who actually did, "I guess it was a close call, all right. But just as you left us, a hospital corps happened to come along on its way to the back and Miss Nelson—the nurse, you remember?—she asked them to take me along. They took me to a wonderful hospital, gave me fine care, and then after a few weeks they sent me back to the States, and I've been in a hospital over here ever since. Now, except for this thickness of my voice that you notice, which Doc says will be all right soon, I'm fit again. The government has given me a job, and I came here on leave just to see my parents up-State, and I thought I'd like you to know that I didn't go West after all."
Fifteen minutes later, Edward Bok left his editorial office for the last time.
But as he went home his thoughts were not of his last day at the office, nor of his last acts as editor, but of his last caller—the soldier-boy whom he had left seemingly so surely on his way "West," and whose eyes had burned into his memory on that fearful night a year before!
Strange that this boy should have been his last visitor!
As John Drinkwater, in his play, makes Abraham Lincoln say to General Grant:
"It's a queer world!"
XXXVII.
The Third Period
The announcement of Edward Bok's retirement came as a great surprise to his friends. Save for one here and there, who had a clearer vision, the feeling was general that he had made a mistake. He was fifty-six, in the prime of life, never in better health, with "success lying easily upon him"—said one; "at the very summit of his career," said another—and all agreed it was "queer," "strange,"—unless, they argued, he was really ill. Even the most acute students of human affairs among his friends wondered. It seemed incomprehensible that any man should want to give up before he was, for some reason, compelled to do so. A man should go on until he "dropped in the harness," they argued.
Bok agreed that any man had a perfect right to work until he did "drop in the harness." But, he argued, if he conceded this right to others, why should they not concede to him the privilege of dropping with the blinders off?