I stood looking straight before me with an odd feeling as if I were turning to stone. Why had I not thought of getting into the cab and driving to Victoria with him, without going on to the platform? What a miserable good-bye I had had--I, who should have had the tenderest! Yesterday morning, when we had left home, his good-bye to his sister and to the naval cadet had been sweet. He had leaned out of the railway carriage window looking with misty eyes at his father still standing on the platform of the East Coast town station, and had said to Vera and to me: "Dear father! I haven't been half good enough to him." And I--I had had to part from him, through no fault of his or mine, as if we were going to meet again in a few hours! It is strange how vividly all these pictures of his whole past life have flashed across my mind again as I have been sitting here waiting for him! It is four months since he went away that day after only that quick, unsatisfying kiss. "I will take care to have a better good-bye when this second leave is over," I told myself aloud. "Only six days, including the travelling! But I don't suppose they can spare the officers for any longer." He is certainly very late. It is beginning to look as if he will not come till to-morrow morning. The weather may be bad in the Channel. Anyhow, we shall have to go on with dinner. I hear a noise of the opening and shutting of doors. I start to my feet. This is he! This must be he! But two or three moments pass and he does not come into the room. And something new and strange and heavy has come into the air of the house; or so, at least, I fancy. My husband comes along. There is something very odd about his step. And his face looks changed, somehow; sharpened in feature and greyish white. "How true it is that electric light sometimes makes people look a dreadful colour!" I think as he comes nearer to me. I ran forward then to meet him. "Where is Roland? Isn't he here? I thought I heard him come." And then for the first time I noticed that the boy's father had a bit of pinkish paper crushed up in his hand. "Is that a telegram?" I cried eagerly, putting out my own hand. "Oh, give it to me! What does it say? Isn't he coming to-night?" One of my husband's arms was put quietly around me. "No. It's no good our waiting for him any longer. He'll never come any more. He's dead. He was badly wounded on Wednesday at midnight, and he died on Thursday." For minutes that were like years the world became to me a shapeless horror of greyness in which there was no beginning and no end, no light and no sound. I did not know anything except that I had to put out my hand and catch at something, with an animal instinct to steady myself so that I might not fall. And then, through the rolling, blinding waves of mist, there came to me suddenly the old childish cry: "Come and see me in bed, mother!" And I heard myself answering aloud: