Boy of My Heart

by Marie Connor Leighton

Mrs. Orme was an unhappy mother of an only son, who had heard on the night of last Christmas Day the news that her treasure had been taken from her. She had been expecting him home, just as we are expecting Little Yeogh Wough now, and had kept the Christmas dinner waiting until ten o'clock. Then they had gone on with the feast—a veritable feast, prepared for the hero who was expected—and, simply by way of a pretty thought, had lifted their champagne glasses and drunk to the soldiers who had fallen in the war.

Little had they thought that they were drinking to their own idol!

I had not been to the house in all the months that had passed since. I had contented myself with writing a letter of sympathy, not having the courage to go and offer to that poor father and mother comfort that could be no comfort. But now I went and heard the whole pitiful story and was shown the still more pitiful clothes with the bullet holes in them, and the identity disc and the wrist watch and the cigarette case and the periscope and all the other things that the War Office kindly sends back to the homes of fallen officers.

I got away as soon as I could, promising to come again soon and bring the lonely-hearted mother a photograph of my Little Yeogh Wough. I went round with the photograph five days later and told the servant that she need not announce me to Mrs. Orme, as I would go up and find her by myself if, as they said, she was alone in her own sitting-room.

I went very softly along the corridor. The door of the sitting-room looked shut, but yielded to a touch and slipped open. I heard a sound of low sobbing, and looked in.

Mrs. Orme was sitting by a table with her arms flung out across it and her head bowed upon them, with her face hidden. In between the sobs half-smothered words were breaking from her and I caught them:

"Oh, Harry, I'm so poor without you! I'm so poor without you! What's the good of anything, now that you're gone? Oh, Harry, come back to me! Come back to me!"

I went back along the corridor and down the stairs and home.

I would send the photograph by post or by a messenger. Not for the whole world would I have let her know that I had seen her in an hour like this.

But people take their grief differently. One young widow that I knew attacked hers with a fountain pen and got the better of it valiantly by writing screed after screed, not only to her relatives and friends, but even to her remotest acquaintances.