Elizabeth was a devoted mother, but Darrell was the most passionately fond father imaginable. The child merely as a pet was worth to him more than all the dogs and horses in existence, including the Irish setter. In him there was a deep well–spring of fatherhood. He had thought himself perfectly happy before the boy was born, but afterwards he felt he had never known what true happiness was until then; and when the child was a year old Darrell, proudly calling him “my soldier,” used to put his own cap on the baby’s pretty head and his sword in its little hand, and throw his military cloak around it and sit and gaze in rapture at the child as it laughed and crowed, delighted with its trappings. At the end of a year, like a judgment from heaven, the child died, after a day’s illness. In general it is the father who consoles the heart–broken mother, but in this case it was Elizabeth who kept Darrell sane in the midst of his terrible grief, who sat by him day and night, who checked by her own tears his strange cries of grief, and who upheld him when he passed through the deep waters. She herself was stricken in heart as only mothers can be, and she had a presentiment that she would never again have a child. Pelham, who would cheerfully have borne all of Elizabeth’s sorrow at the boy’s death, was amazed and even indignant that Darrell should not have sustained her in this dreadful hour. Silently and with a sleepless vigilance and constancy Pelham supported and comforted Elizabeth. _Chapter Four_ There was no one else to sustain Elizabeth. Darrell needed comforting even more than herself. She had formed no intimacies with any of the ladies of the station. There were among them many kind and tender–hearted women, but a barrier had grown up between them and the stranger from America. Gradually the truth was beginning to dawn upon Elizabeth, that she depended more upon Pelham than upon Darrell; that is to say, she had married the wrong man, and the full revelation of this terrible truth came to her within two months of the time that she was left childless. It was in the heat of summer, and Elizabeth was one of those two or three of the officers’ wives, who braved the terrors of the hot season away from the hills in order to be with their husbands.