"Who is it that loves us best?" the child asked the first time she said this prayer.
"I do not know," was the reply. "We can never be sure who loves us best. But God knows, and the good Mother can find out."
"I thought it was you," said Dora. Margaret's voice sank to a whisper. "Perhaps it is, dear."
In a few weeks Mr. Southard also left then, not cheerfully, but with a gloom which he took no pains to conceal.
And the few weeks grew to many weeks, and months multiplied. The summer was gone, and the autumn was gone, and winter melted like a snow-flake on the mantle of time. When our eyes are fixed in anxious longing on some future day, the intermediate days slip through our fingers like sands through an hour-glass, and keep no trace of their passage.
If, when the spring campaign opened, and both the absent ones were in active service, our friends watched with some sinking of the heart for news, it was no more than happened in tens of thousands of other homes. Heart-sickness was by no means a rare disease in those days.
The soldier in charge of the soldier's news-room on Kneeland street became very much interested in one of the few visitors who used to go there that summer. Nearly every say, surely every day when there had been a battle, a pale-faced young lady would open the door, enter quickly, and without looking to right or left go directly to the frames that held the lists of killed and wounded, and read them through from end to end. The soldier got to have an anxious feeling about this lady. Unnoticed by her, he watched her face while she read, and hushed his breath till he saw that terrible look go out of her eyes. The lists finished, she would pull her veil down, sigh wearily, and go out as quietly as she had entered.
"When she finds the name she is looking for, I hall see her drop," he thought.
But Margaret did not drop, though often enough she was in danger of it, as her eyes fell on some blurred name, or some name very like the one she dreaded to see.