CHAPTER XXIII. _"Through the shadows of the globe we sweep into the younger day."_ Tennyson "When the war is over and the boys all get home," Griffith was fond of saying, as he sat and talked with Katherine, "how good it will seem just to live! I've seen all the suffering and shadows of tragedy I want to see for my whole life. The boys and I will make it up to you, Katherine, and these gray hairs that have come," he touched the wavy hair with tender fingers, "these gray hairs that have come since we went away, shall be only memoranda of the past, not heralds of the future." It was such infinite relief to have him at home and well that Katherine almost forgot for a time to feel troubled about her sons. News had come daily from the first about Roy; but now that he was so much improved the letters gradually grew a little less frequent. Sometimes Emma West wrote them, and then the letters were very minute indeed, and full of anxious hopefulness. Her praise of Roy's fortitude, her descriptions of his wonderful courage and the insistence with which she assured Katherine that no duty of all their lives--her father's and mother's--had ever been done with half so hearty a good-will as was the nursing of the young Captain, had in it all a spirit of devotion and a guarded tenderness that Katherine thought she understood. Although it is true that no girl is ever quite good enough to marry any mother's son, Katherine tried to adjust herself with reasonable fortitude to the idea of what she thought she saw in the future. Of course it would be many years in the future before the finality must be faced, and Katherine was learning to live in the present and to push aside that which threatened or even promised, as too uncertain to dwell upon. At last short notes, and then longer ones, from Roy himself began to come, and the time seemed not far off when the invalid would arrive. It was wholly unlikely, he said, that he would be fit for service again during the war, unless the war should last much longer than his original term of enlistment and he should enlist again. Of his final recovery he felt certain. The crushed side was doing well, and he would be only slightly lame, the doctor said. To get him out of the army by even so heroic a process gave his mother comfort, and she felt that she could keep him out now even should he recover before his enlistment period were over, she would, if need be, appeal to Mr. Lincoln, and she felt sure, from all Griffith had told her, that the President would give Roy an honorable discharge. Two of her _brood_ were safe again, she argued with herself, and meantime news from Howard and Beverly was frequent and assuring. Life seemed about to drop into less tragic lines in the little household. Griffith fell to humming his favorite hymns once more, and sometimes as he sat on the porch and watched or greeted the passers-by or read his paper, he would stop to tell Katherine stories of his recent