When they tried to express a little of what they felt about it, Sir James genially stopped them with, “You see, I want him. I don’t know any other youngster whose ideas chime with my own as his do. And I like that Grant boy. And I like you two. I’m inclined to think we shall all get along uncommonly well together. You have lost a son out there, Mrs Dare.” “Our youngest. He was just nineteen.” “I saw about it. It is sad for us to lose them so young and in such a way. But the gain is all theirs when they die as your boy did, and we may not mourn unduly. My dear lad died in South Africa and in very much the same way--trying to save a friend. After all--it’s a noble death to die. And you are nursing, my dear?”--to Alma. “Wounded officers at Oakdene, next door. I was at St Barnabas’s but I made an exchange. You see, I hadn’t seen my husband since the morning we were married.” “Quite right! Your experience will at all events bring sympathy to his work.” “That’s why I took up nursing, four years ago.” “Good girl! You’re the right kind for a doctor’s wife,” and then he shook hands with them, patted Con on the shoulder and bade him get ready for the move into town, shook hands cordially also with Robert Grant and told him they would know one another better before long, and then hurried into his impatient motor and whirled away back to town. “Now isn’t that wonderful?” said Con, with a happier face than he had worn since Landrecies. “He’s splendid,” said Alma. “I love him already.” “For your sake I am very thankful, my dear boy,” said his mother. “God is very gracious to us. If He takes, He also gives, and His ways are very wonderful.” XXXVI Ray Luard was having the time of his life out there, in the sodden fields and soggy mud-holes which did duty for trenches in north-west France.--The time of his life, but not in most respects as the term is usually applied. It was a perpetual amazement to him that anything human and non-amphibious could stand it. That boys, brought up to the comforts and amenities of life, could not only stand it but could and did maintain exceeding cheerfulness under it, provoked his profoundest admiration. And regarding himself aloofly, and from the outside as it were, he shared in his own amazement at his own share in it, and took no little credit to himself, for he certainly never would have believed himself capable of it. But they all kept in mind, and constantly chuckled over, the vehement exhortation of a certain well-known General, who had inspected them shortly after that ghastly-glorious night at Messines. “Keep your billets clean! Keep your bodies clean! Cock your bonnets! And, for God’s sake, smile!”--was what he asked of them; and there had been no more-smiling faces or perkier fighters along that sorely-pressed Western front than the boys with the bare knees and swinging kilts since he said it.