There was violent applause when the singer finished, and after a few minutes he began again.
Pem came nearer to the door, her face grown very pale. “Keep the Home Fires Burning!” Some one else sang that—one night in Montreal—the night before the troop ship went out—a boy in a lieutenant’s uniform. Pem snapped the light and stood listening in the dark, her hands clenched, her eyes closed.
“So turn the dark clouds inside out,
Till the boys come home.”
“Oh, God!” whispered Pem; for that boy would never come home, and the Pem who had listened to his gallant young voice was gone, too.
The singing stopped, only not for Pem. It went on sounding in her ears. The voice that she would never hear again and the living voice mingled together until she could bear it no longer. She must go in and see this other one—see with her own eyes that he was a stranger, in no way like—any one else.
II
Nickie welcomed her with a cry of joy.
“Here’s my pal!” she said, triumphantly. “Now you’ll all have to be good little boys. Pem, here’s Mr. Brown and Mr. Caswell and Mr. Hadley. Look ’em over!”
But the only one Pem wanted to see was Caswell—the boy who had been singing, the boy who must not look like some one else. Well, he didn’t. That one had been fair and this one was dark. There was no resemblance in a single feature; and yet the spell was not broken.
There was some quality in this man that stirred intolerable memories to life in Pem—something in his voice, in his smile, in the hearty grip of his hand. She looked and looked at him, trying in vain to catch that fugitive likeness.