Boy of My Heart

by Marie Connor Leighton

He was at Aldershot with the Officers' Training Corps of his school on that Fourth of August on which the world looked in the face of the fact that Great Britain had declared war against Germany.

One never knows one has been living through happy days until they have gone. Then, looking back, one sees that the way of life that one had thought quite grey and ordinary was all aglow with heavenly light.

A good many things had happened since the night when the Boy and I had patched up the little trouble between us over his telegram. And one of these things was that he had finished his last term at his school in a blaze of honours.

He had been, perhaps, rather too brilliant a meteor there, so that the sky was likely to seem grey after he had vanished from it. He had won a scholarship for a great Oxford college, and he looked into a future so gloriously golden that he himself had almost turned his eyes from it, dazzled and half afraid.

Some months before this he had brought home once on a week's visit one of his two best friends, a very tall and straight and serious boy called Edward Brennan. My first ideas of Edward were that he did not greatly care for womankind and that, considering that he was so young, he had an astonishing worship of the music of Beethoven.

"I can't understand it," I had said to him once. "Oh, of course I recognise that Beethoven is very great, and all that, and I like his music about twice a year when I feel ecclesiastical; but on the whole he always strikes me as a composer who was born an old man and who made music for old men."

"Why, mother always worships old men!" put in Little Yeogh Wough mischievously.

"Yes, but not as musical composers," I retorted. "You see, I've got a mind that always has what you may call the apple-blossom feeling in it, and anything fusty always repels me. I would run miles bare-foot to avoid seeing Stonehenge or any ruins. It's good that those things should be in the world in order to give the dry-as-dust people something to do to write about them; but in general I agree with Emerson that it's not the business of the rose that blooms to-day to worry itself into wrinkles about the roses that bloomed even yesterday—much less two thousand years ago."

And then the rather cold Edward had quite warmed up and had done a thing that I liked. He had actually had the boldness to hold back my arm when I was putting a modern French serenade record on the gramophone, and insist on substituting for it a part of "Leonora."