shaking and the words forced
themselves from between her chattering teeth, "what my Willie boy would
have been now--if he hadn't--run away. My little son! My baby!"

CHAPTER IV

MRS. SANDERSON'S STORY

Tears were not only in her eyes now, but running down her wrinkled old
face, and the girls, with the tears of real pity in their own eyes,
crowded closer about her.

"Would it help," Betty suggested gently, "if you told us about it?"

The old lady drew her gaze from the window and let it rest on the sweet,
sympathetic young face, and she nodded slowly.

"I guess maybe it would," she agreed, taking a handkerchief from the
pocket in her dress and wiping her eyes. "You see, I never have told
anybody for years and years, and if it hadn't been for this war I suppose
I should have gone right on not telling anybody for the rest of my life.
Of course the Yates and Baldwins and all the folks that lived around us
knew it, so there was no use telling them--" Her voice trailed off and her
eyes sought the window with its vista of parade ground and low, roughly
built barracks buildings.

The girls looked at her. Never in their lives, they thought, had they been
so thoroughly interested in anything as they were in the secret sorrow of
this gentle old lady, the sorrow that brought that strange cloud of
unhappiness every time she mentioned this son of hers who had run away.

"He must have been a pretty ungrateful sort," thought Mollie resentfully,
"to have run away from a mother who loved him like that."

Once more the old lady drew her eyes from the window and fixed them on the
circle of eager young faces.

"I suppose young things like you couldn't be expected to understand," she
went on, "and yet perhaps you'll be interested more than other folks,
'count of your having met so many young boys."

"Oh, we are interested," they cried in chorus, at which the old woman's
face lighted up and she went on with more cheerfulness.

"Well, to begin with," she said, "we lived way at t'other end o' the
world. Danestown, it was called, and my husband--better man never
breathed--died when my little boy was only four years old. I wasn't so
young any more, for Willie was the youngest--the others had all died when
they was babies--and Willie's pa and me was getting along in years when
he come to us--the dearest, sweetest, prettiest baby you ever set your
eyes on.

"Well, we had managed to save some little money, though 'twasn't over