"He volunteered for special service in Afghanistan, and there he disappeared. Whether he was killed or taken prisoner, none knows, except God. But I am sure that if he could have come to me, he would have come long ago. His anger against me could not have endured all these years." "You poor, poor old man!" said I, beginning to cry: the story had made me feel so lonely and forlorn. The General came round and stroked my hair tenderly. "Good little girl!" he said, "to be so sorry for an old man's trouble." But indeed I felt as if the trouble were my own. "There, my dear," he went on. "Don't spoil your pretty eyes. Kneel down with me now, and let us resign ourselves to the Will. Wherever my boy is, and it is hard not to know what is befalling him, he is never out of reach of the Power and the Love." We knelt down then, and the poor old General poured out a prayer which I thought most heart-breaking in its pathos. I seemed to realize, as he revealed his heart unconsciously, all the fears my old friend had had to endure for his boy in the hands of a cruel enemy. The prayer seemed to help and comfort both of us. When we stood up I took the General's brown old hand in mine. "I am sure he will come back," I said fervently. "Thank you, my dear, thank you," he said hastily; and then he added, "I am sure you are a blessing, a helper and comfort sent from God to a lonely old man." Then he told me how he had come to quarrel with his son. He had tried to make a marriage for him with a certain Miss Milbank, and when the young man had refused to accept his father's choice for him the hasty quarrel had ensued. "Now, my dear," said the old General sadly, "you understand how it is that I come to have so many pretty things. I would have given up everything to them, so long as they kept me in a corner of their hearts, and a corner of their pretty house, where I could look on at my boy's happiness, and see perhaps the little grandchildren growing up about me. I wanted to settle him, to ensure his happiness, as if I could be his Providence. Well, well, and I thought May Milbank cared for him, but afterwards I found that I was all wrong." "Dear General," said I again, "I am quite sure he will come back." CHAPTER XIX. I VISIT THE GREAT WORLD. It must not be imagined that during those happy weeks I had been quite forgetting my novel. On the contrary, it grew steadily during the morning hours in which I worked at it, and it was not the worse, I am sure, for the new pleasantness that had come into my life.