This is only one instance out of the scores that present themselves to us on every hand. Compensation is a very real and very pitiless Force. Knowing this, I was afraid; terribly afraid: and as I saw the beauty grow in Little Yeogh Wough's baby body and in his mind, which always, even from the beginning, seemed to know things which he had never been taught, I began to pray night after night:
"Don't take him away from me, oh God! Don't take him away!"
And now he is in khaki, a lieutenant and adjutant at just twenty years old—and is coming home from the Front on his second leave.
When I first realised that he would soon be coming home, I went out into the loft over the old stables and took his baby clothes out of an old trunk and looked at them. And, as I looked, it seemed to me such a little while since he had worn them.
How patient I had been with him in those days—I, who am not patient by nature! How I had walked up and down with him, sat up at night with him, sung for him strange songs about butcher boys and tom cats, and interrupted my work a score of times every hour for him! But I never yielded to him, not even in those babyhood days, for I wanted him to grow up to be a fine sample of manhood, and I knew that if he was to do that he must know that his mother was not weak.
A little cream silk coat and a pair of cream woollen gaiters reminded me of his first tryings to speak. His little stumbling words had always had a thought behind them. How he had taken us aback one morning when he had presented himself before us with a pen behind his ear, saying with an owl-like wiseness: "Fishman doos that." This referred to the fishmonger whom he visited every morning with his old nurse for the giving of orders. And then, another time, when I was annoyed with my brother and said to him that something he had done was: "Just the sort of thing that eccentric males always do," the room door had opened suddenly to admit a little figure in the cream silk pelisse and woollen gaiters, and a baby voice had cried reproachfully:
"Not 'centric males. No!"
"He's beginning pretty early to stand up for his own sex," my brother said with a laugh that drove away the cloud of annoyance between us.
And yet the boy had in him that touch of the feminine which the best men have and which makes them irresistible. Already in his little way he had a knightly reverence for womanhood. Already his few pence of pocket money were spent on flowers for me.
I remember that what struck me most when he came into the room at this time was his brave little walk. He always had such brave, gay feet! I thought of this again last week when in answer to my question in a letter as to how his battalion had got all the way down from near Ypres to somewhere east of Abbeville, he said: