in different fashion than we hoped.
Only keep your manhood pure and the windows of your spirit clear,
so the Light can shine through. Then you will know if I speak
truth, and you will not feel altogether alone.

"Oh, Roy, I could write and write till the pen drops. My heart is
too full, but my hand is too feeble for more. Only this, when your
time comes for marriage, I pray you will be to your wife all that
your splendid father has been for me--king and lover and companion
of body and spirit. Draw nearer than ever, you two, because of your
so beautiful love for me--unseen now, but with you always. God
bless you. I can write no more.

"Your devoted
MOTHER."

The last lines wavered and ran together. In spite of her injunction,
tears _would_ come. Chill and unheeded, they slipped down his cheeks,
while he folded his treasure, and put it away with the other, that went
to his head, a little, as she had foreseen; though in the event, it had
been overshadowed by her own, than which she could have left him no
dearer legacy. In life she had been an angel of God. In death, she was
still his angel of comfort and healing. She had bidden him share her
belief; and he never _had_ felt altogether alone. Sustained by that
inner conviction, he had somehow adapted himself to the strangeness of a
life empty of her physical presence. The human being, in a world of
pain, like the insect in a world of danger, lives mainly by that same
ceaseless, unconscious miracle of adaptation. Dearly though he craved a
sight of his father and Christine, he had not asked for leave home.
There were bad moments when he wondered if he could ever bring himself
to face the ordeal. He sincerely hoped they understood. Their letters
left an impression that it was so. Jeffers obviously did.

And Tara----? Her belated letter, from the wilds of Serbia, had
revealed, in every line, that she understood only too well. For Tara,
not long before, had passed through her own ordeal--the death, in a
brilliant air fight, of her second brother Atholl, her devotee and hero
from nursery days. So when Roy's turn came, her fulness of sympathy and
understanding were outstretched like wings to shield him, if might be,
from the worst, as she had known it.

For that once, she flung aside the veil of grown-up reserves and wrote
straight from her eager