Ruth slept, strangely comforted. CHAPTER XXXIV THE STATION Next day Ernie was to join up. After dinner he kissed Susie and Jenny, gave them each a penny, and despatched them to play. Hand in hand they stamped away to Motcombe Garden with clacking heels, roguish backward glances and merry tongues. Then he asked Ruth to go into the backyard. Left alone with Alice he lifted her on to the kitchen-table, took her hands in his, and looked gravely into her eyes. "I trust you to look after mother and the little ones when I'm gone, Lal," he said. The little maid, swift and sympathetic as her mother, nodded at him, nibbling her handkerchief, her heart too full for words. Then she raised her crumpled face, that at the moment was so like her mother's, for a last kiss, and as she wreathed her arms round his neck she whispered, "You are my daddy, aren't you, daddy?" "Of course I am," he murmured, and lifted her down. She ran away swiftly, not trusting herself to look back. A moment later Ruth entered the kitchen, slowly and with downcast eyes. He was standing before the fire, awaiting her. "Ruth," he said quietly. "I've tried to do well by your child; I'll ask you to do the same by mine." She came to him and hung about his neck, riven with sobs, her head on his shoulder. "O Ern!" she cried. "And is that your last word to me?" She lifted anguished eyes to him and clung to him. "I love them all just the same, only we been through so much together, she and me. That's where it is." His arms were about her and he was stroking her. "I knaw that then," he said, husky himself. "See, they got you and each other and all the world," Ruth continued. "Little Alice got nobody only her mother." "And me," said Ernie. She steadied and drew her hand across rain-blurred eyes. "Ern," she said, deeply. "I do thank you for all your lovin kindness to that child. I've never forgot that all through--whatever it seemed." "She's mine just as well as yours," he answered, smiling and uncertain. "Always has been. Always will be." She pressed her lips on his with a passion that amazed him. Then he took the boy from the cot and rocked him. The tears poured down his face. This, then, was War!--All his light-heartedness, his detachment, had gone. He was a husband and a father torn brutally away from the warmth and tenderness of the home that was so dear to him, to be tossed into the arena among wild beasts who not long since had been men just like himself, and would be men still but for the evil power of their masters to do by them as his masters had done by him. Then he put the child back and turned to say good-bye to Ruth. The passionate wife of a few minutes since had changed now into the mother parting from her schoolboy. She took him to her heart and hugged him.