"Yes ... he is gone ... there is the message ... see! My son ... my eldest son. So be it, God! This is no time for tears ... no time to mourn. In the years to come, When we have done our work, and God's own peace With tranquil glory floods a troubled world, Why, then, perhaps, in the old hall at home, Our eyes, my wife, shall meet and gleam, and mark, Niched on the walls in sanctity of pride, Hal's sword, Dick's medal, and the cross He won, Yet never wore. That is the time for tears; Drawn from a well of love deep down ... deep down; Deep as the mystery of immortal souls. That is the time for tears ... not now! Not now!" And then the last line of some verses which I saw somewhere else, headed "The Second Lieutenant": "Up and up to his God," and, best and worst of all, Rupert Brooke's: "If I should die, think only this of me, That there's one corner of a foreign field Shall be for ever England----" When I got to this point, the tears which had been blinding me so that I could hardly see what I was doing brimmed over and fell on the back brush. Why did I let those tears come when I ought to have been smiling and singing because he is coming home? I might as well be foolish enough to cry now, when I am sitting here waiting for him and when I know that at some blessed moment during the next half-hour he is bound to come in. I was quite angry with myself when I wiped my tears away that time a fortnight ago. I dried the back brush with unnecessary energy and then took another and closer look about his room. One of his hats and his riding whip hung together on the wall above shelves of books which he had bought himself. Every one of those books spoke to me of him as I glanced at their titles. Another bookcase was gloriously rich with his Public School prizes. Such handsome, wonderful books they are; and there are about fifty of them. What a tale they tell of power and effort! I had had a curtain made for the bookcase, to keep the dust away from these most precious of treasures, and as I drew the velvet folds back now and looked at the massive ornamental volumes, I felt a thrill at the thought that my continual spurring of him onward and upward had not been in vain. "And he has never disappointed me," I thought aloud. No, he had never disappointed me. And people as a rule are so disappointing! One's friends fall short, one's lover says the wrong thing at the wrong time, or forgets to say the right thing--which is even worse--and one's dearest clergymen and favourite actors and heroes generally make unspeakable fools of themselves just as one is getting ready to fall on one's knees and worship them.