THE letters brought the mother back to her home. She had altered strangely in the two months she had been in the city. Always slim, she seemed now a mere shadow of a woman—slight and frail as if a breath would blow her away. But the thin face still retained its gentle sweetness of expression and the eyes held that smile of hope.
The children were glad to see her. Laughing and crying they clung to her.
“Why,” she said, as if she had only just realized it, “what a lot there is to live for!”
“Seven of us, mother,” said Marion; “no, eight!—for there’s Gozo, too.”
She took no one into her confidence, but began, in secret, a correspondence with the Minister of War. All of her inquiries were answered. In Japan her husband had not been without high influence, and his heroism had made his name revered by all Japanese. Hence the requests of his widow were given the greatest attention. Soon they had reached the highest authorities. Orders went straight to the field of action. At last there came a day when she knew that a special search was to be made for her husband—dead or alive.
The Russians would tell if he were with them. If not, then, at least, his body must be found. Such were the orders issued from a high place.
She was like a flower opening to the sunshine and spring rain. The color came back to her pale cheeks and lips. Back also came the light of health to her eyes. She moved like a new person.
The assurance that no stone would be left unturned to learn her husband’s fate, and her strange faith that he was still alive, invigorated her. The change effected in her rapidly spread to the entire household. Gloom slipped out of the door and sunshine ventured in with summer. And this is as it should be in the house of children.
While the cherry blossoms were still flying like myriad pink-and-white birds in the skies and all the mossy ground was white with the flowery carpet blown from the trees, the family went out once again on a flower picnic.
In the same little flowery gowns, the sleeve-wings weighted with petals, they started gayly for the picnic grounds where “father” had taken them only a year before. A gentle melancholy which pervaded even the youngest of them, at the memory of that absent one, was dispersed with the mother’s thought!