“’Tis a pair of grays!” he added in a moment. They were all perfectly motionless from curiosity now. Who had grays in that neighborhood? “There’s two men in it,” Mary affirms. Then Peter yells, “One is wearing blue!” They can scarcely breathe now. Blue! Can it be blue! This is too much for Mary. “Run, Peter!” she cries. “Tell mother! Get father! It has the looks of a soldier!” It is three weeks now since the last battle, since word has come from Wully. The little girls are jumping about in excitement. The children’s shouts had not at all disturbed the mother in the kitchen, where she sat sewing, until--could she believe her ears?--they were shouting, “’Tis Wully, mother! ’Tis Wully!” She ran out of the house, down the path. “It never is!” she says, unsteadily. But she can see someone in blue, someone standing up, waving a cap now. She can see his white face. The children bolt down the road. She can see him, her black-bearded first-born. The driver is whipping up the horses. Home from battles, pale to the lips, he is in her arms. But she is paler. “Run for your father!” she cries, to whoever will heed her. The children are pulling at him boisterously. The strange driver is patting his horses, his back to the family reunited. Hugged, and kissed, and patted and loved, the bearded Wully turns to the stranger. “This is Mr. Knight, of Tyler, mother. He brought me all the way.” “’Tis a kind thing you have done!” she exclaims, shaking his hand devoutly. “Oh, he was a soldier. And he didn’t look able to walk so far.” “You’re not sick!” she cries to Wully, scanning his face. Certainly he was not sick, now. He could have walked it, but he was glad he didn’t have to, he adds, smiling engagingly at the stranger. They stand together awkwardly, joy-smitten, looking at one another, excited beyond words. Then the mother leads the way to the unpainted house, the children hanging to Wully, dancing about. The fifteen-year-old Andrew was working in the farther part of the field just below the house that afternoon, when he saw, from a distance, his father, called by Peter, suddenly leave his plow, and run towards the house surely faster than an old man ever runs. His own team was fly-bitten and restless, and he left it just long enough to see that in front of the house there was a team and a light wagon. He unhitched his half-broken young steers, urged them impatiently to the nearest tying place, and hurried to the house. What he saw there made so great an impression on him, that fifty-seven years later, when that stranger’s grandson was one of the disheartened veterans of the World War who came to his office looking for work, the whole scene rose before him in such poignancy that he had to turn his head away abruptly, remembering....