"Yes." He answered me in a very tender voice which no one else knew. "You see, if you come up with me to London to-morrow we shall be sleeping in different places--you at the hotel and I at Uncle Jack's--and after that I shall be going straight to my rooms at Norwich. And even if my battalion gets accidentally ordered to this town, I shall have to sleep at headquarters. This place would be too far off. And I don't suppose there'll be much leave going, because the battalion is so raw and wants such a lot of training." "What a splendid thing your five years' O.T.C. training has been for you!" "Yes. The O.T.C. major has written to the commanding officer of my battalion and told him what he thinks of me as a trained soldier already, and it seems to have been a pretty good opinion, so I don't expect I shall be long getting out to the Front. I don't mean to be long. I'll move heaven and earth to get out there. I know you won't try to keep me back. You know, you said to me once, not very long ago, that every man has two mothers, his flesh-and-blood mother and his country, and he owes as much to the one as to the other. That's what makes that American song: 'I didn't raise my son to be a soldier,' all wrong." I had knelt down by his bedside again and was smoothing the mass of his hair. We were silent for a long while and then I suddenly found myself saying: "I wonder if a mother's love is really all gold, as people say it is, Little Yeogh Wough, or whether there isn't a good deal of the dross of pride in it! Now, I would take off my skin and sit in my bones to keep you from feeling cold, but, after all, that's because you are mine, and I suppose I am selfish enough to think, though it's wrong to do so, that what is mine is more precious than what is anybody else's. Of course, if much of this pride comes in, it takes the holiness away from the love." "I don't think you need trouble about that, when it's a question of you and me," he returned. I was still stroking his hair. And then something, though I could not have told what, made me whisper to him: "Say: 'Our Father, Which art in Heaven,' with me, Little Yeogh Wough." I did not know then what he felt lately about these things. So much had happened that might have changed him since I had caught a glimpse of the ivory crucifix half hidden under other things in his drawer. But, with his lips close to my face, he repeated the prayer with me. I had left him about half an hour when a loud knocking came at the front door. Without disturbing my husband I slipped some clothes on and went downstairs, but could find no trace of either Little Yeogh Wough or Edward. Presently they both came in, in dressing-gowns and bedroom slippers, and I learned that they had been guiding down to the sea some coast patrols, new-comers to the locality, who had lost their way.