sy in my mind? Why else, all through
that Sunday, had it been so impossible for me to take comfort in what
was said to cheer me? Some warning had come to me, some sense that
all was not well.

Realization came to me slowly. I sat and stared at that slip of
paper, that had come to me like the breath of doom. Dead! Dead these
four days! I was never to see the light of his eyes again. I was
never to hear that laugh of his. I had looked on my boy for the last
time. Could it be true? Ah, I knew it was! And it was for this moment
that I had been waiting, that we had all been waiting, ever since we
had sent John away to fight for his country and do his part. I think
we had all felt that it must come. We had all known that it was too
much to hope that he should be one of those to be spared.

The black despair that had been hovering over me for hours closed
down now and enveloped all my senses. Everything was unreal. For a
time I was quite numb. But then, as I began to realize and to
visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead there
came a great pain. The iron of realization slowly seared every word
of that curt telegram upon my heart. I said it to myself, over and
over again. And I whispered to myself, as my thoughts took form, over
and over, the one terrible word: "Dead!"

I felt that for me everything had come to an end with the reading of
that dire message. It seemed to me that for me the board of life was
black and blank. For me there was no past and there could be no
future. Everything had been swept away, erased, by one sweep of the
hand of a cruel fate. Oh, there was a past, though! And it was in
that past that I began to delve. It was made up of every memory I had
of my boy. I fell at once to remembering him. I clutched at every
memory, as if I must grasp them and make sure of them, lest they be
taken from me as well as the hope of seeing him again that the
telegram had forever snatched away.

I would have been destitute indeed then. It was as if I must fix in
my mind the way he had been wont to look, and recall to my ears every
tone of his voice, every trick of his speech. There was something
left of him that I must keep, I knew, even then, at all costs, if I
was to be able to bear his loss at all.

There was a vision of him before my eyes. My bonnie Highland laddie,
brave and strong in his kilt and the uniform of his country, going
out to his death with a smile on his face. And there was anothe