"You, too, have a son, I believe?" Mrs Jones was saying.
"Yes." She had an only son. His name was Connell. He was six years old.
"And very dear to you, I know!" The eyes of the woman whose only son was drowned shone with sympathy. They were speaking eyes, really beautiful with that light in them.
"Very dear to me," responded the woman in Freddy's chair. To her eyes came a sudden, unexpected rush of tears. Of her own child she felt she could not speak to this unconsciously bereaved mother.
"And six years old? Ah! Now I must show you what my dear boy was like at six."
She got up, and fetched from the mantelpiece a photograph of a tiny boy in a sailor's dress; a plain-featured, ordinary-looking little boy, with dark eyes too solemn for his age.
"Now, is your boy as big, do you think? We considered Freddy a fine boy. And whom do you think he takes after?"
"He is like you—about the eyes," Mrs Macmichel said. She gave the photograph hurriedly back. She could not endure to look upon the eyes closed now upon their "first dark day of nothingness."
Mrs Jones put the portrait tenderly in its place. "That big photograph standing above the clock was taken only the other day," she said. "When he was appointed to the Doughty, I wished so much to have him in his uniform. But the trouble I had to get him to have it taken! For no inducement in the world but to please me would he appear in uniform when not on duty, he said."
And now he lay, like Nicanor, "dead in his harness."