often, and
Mrs. Lauder has wondered with me, what the fathers and mothers of
Britain would do in these black days without prayer to guide them and
sustain them. So we could but stand there, keeping back our tears and
our fears, and hoping for the best. One thing was sure; we might not
let the laddie see how close we were to greeting. It was for us to be
so brave as God would let us be. It was hard for him. He was no boy,
you ken, going blindly and gayly to a great adventure; he had need of
the finest courage and devotion a man could muster that day.

For he knew fully now what it was that he was going back to. He knew
the hell the Huns had made of war, which had been bad enough, in all
conscience, before they did their part to make it worse. And he was
high strung. He could live over, and I make no doubt he did, in those
days after he had his orders to go back, every grim and dreadful
thing that was waiting for him out there. He had been through it all,
and he was going back. He had come out of the valley of the shadow,
and now he was to ride down into it again.

And it was with a smile he left us! I shall never forget that. His
thought was all for us whom he was leaving behind. His care was for
us, lest we should worry too greatly and think too much of him.

"I'll be all right," he told us. "You're not to fret about me, any of
you. A man does take his chances out there--but they're the chances
every man must take these days, if he's a man at all. I'd rather be
taking them than be safe at home."

We did our best to match the laddie's spirit and be worthy of him.
But it was cruelly hard. We had lost him and found him again, and now
he was being taken from us for the second time. It was harder, much
harder, to see him go this second time than it had been at first, and
it had been hard enough then, and bad enough. But there was nothing
else for it. So much we knew. It was a thing ordered and inevitable.

And it was not many days before we had slipped back into the way
things had been before John was invalided home. It is a strange thing
about life, the way that one can become used to things. So it was
with us. Strange things, terrible things, outrageous things, that, in
time of peace, we would never have dared so much as to think
possible, came to be the matters of every day for us. It was so with
John. We came to think of it as natural that he should be away from
us, and in peril of his life every minute of every hou