Boy of My Heart

by Marie Connor Leighton

"Then she must be good-looking!" I exclaimed. And I added to myself: "She must be a girl of fascination—a girl to be reckoned with!—and not a mere stick to hang drapers' advertised wares upon."

The next day The Bystander slipped close to my side in the garden and said:

"Mother, I've found out what book it is that Roland has sent to Edward's sister. You see, the people in the shop where he got it asked me just now if I thought he wanted to pay for it separately or if they should put it down on the account. It's 'The Story of an African Farm.'"

I had a feeling as if something were clutching at my heart. I said a few words in answer and then I went to the back drive and walked up and down there by myself.

I was glad Little Yeogh Wough was out. I wanted to be apart from him and to think.

"If he has sent Vera Brennan 'The Story of an African Farm,' then she can't be the ordinary sort of girl," I thought. "She can't be of the great army of those who play games and are always taking bodily exercise, yet never by any chance do anything more useful than arrange cut flowers. He could have passed on his way among thousands of these without taking any notice of them. She must be a personality—one of the few girls who can think and are not afraid to do it; one of the few who know what real romance is and who, because they know this, will always be able to marry as often as they like, no matter how small the number of marriageable men may be, while other women stand around and gasp for a husband in vain. And if she is this—then he is not wholly and only mine now as he was a few weeks ago. He will never be wholly mine any more."

"So we are in it. We are in the European Soup," I wrote to Little Yeogh Wough in his Officers' Training Corps camp at Aldershot, when war had been declared.

But he was beside me before my letter could have reached him.

"The War Office broke us up," he explained. "There was no room there any more for boys who were only playing at soldiering. But I'm going to do the real thing. I'm going to set about it to-morrow."