Maurice was shut up in Ladysmith.
"Don't worry, Mummy. That'll keep him out of mischief. Daddy said he ought to be shut up somewhere."
"He's starving, Dorothy. He won't have anything to eat."
"Or drink, ducky."
"Oh, you're cruel! Don't be cruel!"
"I'm not cruel. If I didn't care so awfully for you, Mummy, I shouldn't mind whether he came back or didn't. You're cruel. You ought to think of Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmy and Auntie Edie."
"At the moment," said Frances, "I am thinking of Uncle Morrie."
She was thinking of him, not as he actually was, but as he had been, as a big boy like Michael, as a little boy like John, two years younger than she; a little boy by turns spoiled and thwarted, who contrived, nevertheless, to get most things that he happened to want by crying for them, though everybody else went without. And in the grown-up Morrie's place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw Nicky.
For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army.
"And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to miss it."