"He—he was—just like—" The slight form was shaking and the words forced themselves from between her chattering teeth, "what my Willie boy would have been now—if he hadn't—run away. My little son! My baby!"
CHAPTER IV
MRS. SANDERSON'S STORY
Tears were not only in her eyes now, but running down her wrinkled old face, and the girls, with the tears of real pity in their own eyes, crowded closer about her.
"Would it help," Betty suggested gently, "if you told us about it?"
The old lady drew her gaze from the window and let it rest on the sweet, sympathetic young face, and she nodded slowly.
"I guess maybe it would," she agreed, taking a handkerchief from the pocket in her dress and wiping her eyes. "You see, I never have told anybody for years and years, and if it hadn't been for this war I suppose I should have gone right on not telling anybody for the rest of my life. Of course the Yates and Baldwins and all the folks that lived around us knew it, so there was no use telling them—" Her voice trailed off and her eyes sought the window with its vista of parade ground and low, roughly built barracks buildings.
The girls looked at her. Never in their lives, they thought, had they been so thoroughly interested in anything as they were in the secret sorrow of this gentle old lady, the sorrow that brought that strange cloud of unhappiness every time she mentioned this son of hers who had run away.
"He must have been a pretty ungrateful sort," thought Mollie resentfully, "to have run away from a mother who loved him like that."