Their lives had been linked together in a most curious way. They had never had any particular liking for each other—indeed, it must have been almost the other way about, for Little Yeogh Wough had never brought him to us or gone to his home—and yet in their careers they had been as brother spirits.
They had both opened their eyes on life in the same year and month, and within a stone's throw of each other in London. They had both been given the Christian name of Roland, spelt without a "w."
They met by going to the same preparatory school, and from the hour of this first meeting their lives had run side by side. They had not run quite neck and neck, for Little Yeogh Wough was always ahead. He got a seventy-pound scholarship for a certain great Public School, when Gretton won a fifty-pound one.
It was the same with Oxford, for which they both gained classical scholarships. Little Yeogh Wough was always well ahead. Yet, still, they were always together.
When the war had come, they had got their commissions at the same time. But Gretton had got out to the Front first.
"I shall get out soon now that Gretton's out there," Little Yeogh Wough had said to me confidently.
And he had gone soon, and they had fought the Germans side by side, as they had fought for honours at school. And now Gretton had been killed, and my husband had dreamed that he saw him walking with our Roland, arm linked in arm, holding on to him closely and refusing to let him go.
"I am a fool to think anything of a dream," I told myself angrily, trying to thrust away from me the grey spectre of Fear that had risen up before me suddenly in the pale winter sunlight. "After all, what is a dream? It's a thing that never comes to a person in perfect health—except once in a way, when one happens to be awakened about half an hour before one's proper time and then goes off into a doze. And then, there is Little Yeogh Wough's lucky white lock. That will keep him from being killed. He will get badly wounded, I dare say, but not killed—no, certainly, not killed."
I have not mentioned the boy's lucky white lock of hair before. It was a queer little white patch in among the gold, just over his left ear.
It was Gretton who, when they went to school first, had called Little Yeogh Wough a sixpenny-halfpenny Golliwog.