g up the pet
of all the police; he was becoming manlier, sturdier, more
self-reliant every day. But education he _must_ have, and another
winter of such deprivation and horror he was too young, too tender,
to endure. It was then that the battle arose in her heart. The boy
was to be sent to college. Was it her place to accompany him to the
distant South-east, to live by herself alone in the college town,
just to be near him and watch over his young life, or was it here
with her pioneer soldier husband, and his little isolated garrison
of "boys" whom she had mothered for two years?

The inevitable day came when she had to shut her teeth and watch
Grahamie go aboard the southward-bound vessel alone, in the care of
a policeman who was returning on sick leave--to watch him stand at
the rail, his little face growing dimmer and more shadowy as the
sea widened between them--watch him through tearless, courageous
eyes, then turn away with the hopelessness of knowing that for one
entire endless year she must wait for word of his arrival. [Fact.]
But his last brave good-bye words rang through her ears every day
of that eternal year: "We'll remember Sergeant Black, won't we,
mother? And we'll each fight it out alone, single-handed, and maybe
they'll give us a chevron for our sleeves when it's over."

But that night when the barracks was wrapped in gloom over the
loss of its boy chum, the surgeon appeared in the men's quarters.
"Hello, boys!" he said, none too cheerfully. "Dull doings, I say.
I'm busy enough, though, keeping an eye on Madam, the major's lady.
She's so deadly quiet, so self-controlled, I'm just a little afraid.
I wish something would happen to--well, make her less calm."

"_I'll_ 'happen,' doctor," chirped up a genial-looking young chap
named O'Keefe. "I'll get sick and threaten to die. You say it's
serious; she'll be all interest and medicine spoons, and making me
jelly inside an hour."

The surgeon eyed him sternly, then: "O'Keefe," he said, "you're the
cleverest man I ever came across in the force, and I've been in it
eleven years. But, man alive! what have you been doing to yourself?
Overwork, no food--why, man, you're sick; look as if you had fever
and a touch of pneumonia. You're a very sick man. Go to bed at
once--at once, I say!"

O'Keefe looked the surgeon in the eye, winked meaningly, and
O'Keefe turned in, although it was but early afternoon. At six
o'clock an orderly stood at the door of the major'