As they entered the car set apart for ladies and their escorts, as was the custom now, a woman in front of them with a little baby, heard a voice outside:
“Madam, please lend me your baby.”
Her eyes were red and swollen with weeping. She had been pressing her child closely to her breast. She looked down. It was a poor soldier with a wounded arm who was going home. Without a word she handed her baby through the window, and in a few minutes it bobbed up serenely at the car door. The guard thinking it was the man’s child, let him pass into the more comfortable car.
“Thank you,” he said, seating himself wearily and handing the baby back.
Soon another soldier borrowed it, and another also, before the train started on its long, slow ride to Columbia. The rolling stock had fairly given out during the four years in which nothing could be done to replenish or repair it.
“Madam, will you give another lady a seat?” she heard the conductor say to the woman with the baby, who was leaning on a package that lay on two seats and was covered with a faded shawl. The woman looked up and moved and they saw that it was a rude wooden coffin.
Her eyes were red and inflamed with much weeping, and she spoke softly in the accents of the hills.
“It is my husband; I am taking him home.”
Nor did Helen know who the sweet sufferer was, though she heard her ask, when she left the train at Columbia, when the next train went north to Dunvegan.