It is between a fortnight and three weeks since I first had the hope that he might come home on this second leave.
The way the sudden hope affected me showed me how little I had expected that he would ever come home again. I had lived through the fearfulness and anguish of his death so many times in the early days when he had just gone out to the Front. One day in particular I remember when, in the quiet of the big house by the sea, with the drip, drip of the rain telling us that it was useless to hope to go out, we had gone to lie down for half an hour after lunch and to read an article in a newspaper on the hospital at Bailleul.
We were three of us resting on the wide bed—I and the boy's father and his sixteen-year-old sister, whom he always called The Bystander, who was lying across the foot of the bed. The newspaper article was by an American journalist, describing with mingled power and tenderness some dreadful cases that had been taken to the hospital. Then there was mention made of a boy soldier who did not seem very badly hurt and whom the doctor ordered to be placed on one side for conveyance to England. The American journalist looked at the boy a few moments later and then touched the medical officer's sleeve.
"Doctor," he said in a low voice, "that boy will never go to England. He's going to sleep in France."
Going to sleep in France!
The awful, unspeakable piteousness of the simple little sentence cut through me like a knife. It seemed to me that all my heart and all my soul melted away in tears as I lay there and sobbed and sobbed.
The boy's father and sister were crying, too.
And then I prayed.
I had always been a self-centred, worldly woman, not much inclined to prayer; but in that hour I prayed with the humble passionateness of dread and desperation.
How I loved the boy—I, who had never believed that I could really unselfishly love anybody!