ly detect in the
greeting of the small firm hand. But it was kind, as indeed her whole
reception of me was; only it had always been the way of Catherine the
correspondent to make one expect a little more than mere kindness, and
of Catherine the companion to disappoint that expectation. Her
conversation needed few exclamatory points.

"Still halt and lame," she murmured over my sticks. "You poor thing, you
are to sit down this instant."

And I obeyed her as one always had, merely remarking that I was getting
along famously now.

"You must have had an awful time," continued Catherine, seating herself
near me, her calm wise eyes on mine.

"Blood-poisoning," said I. "It nearly knocked me out, but I'm glad to
say it didn't quite."

Indeed, I had never felt quite so glad before.

"Ah! that was too hard and cruel; but I was thinking of the day itself,"
explained Catherine, and paused in some sweet transparent awe of one who
had been through it.

"It was a beastly day," said I, forgetting her objection to the epithet
until it was out. But Catherine did not wince. Her fixed eyes were full
of thought.

"It was all that here," she said. "One depressing morning I had a
telegram from Bob, 'Spion Kop taken'--"

"So Bob," I nodded, "had it as badly as everybody else!"

"Worse," declared Catherine, her eye hardening; "it was all I could do
to keep him at Cambridge, though he had only just gone up. He would have
given up everything and flown to the Front if I had let him."

And she wore the inexorable face with which I could picture her standing
in his way; and in Catherine I could admire that dogged look and all it
spelt, because a great passion is always admirable. The passion of
Catherine's life was her boy, the only son of his mother, and she a
widow. It had been so when he was quite small, as I remembered it with a
pinch of jealousy startling as a twinge from an old wound. More than
ever must it be so now; that was as natural as the maternal embargo in
which Catherine seemed almost to glory. And yet, I reflected, if all the
widows had thought only of their only sons--and of themselves!

"The next depressing morning," continued Catherine, happily oblivious of
what was passing through one's mind, "the first thing I saw, the first
time I put my nose outside, was a great pink placard with 'Spion Kop
Abandoned!' Duncan, it was too awful."

"I wish we'd sat tight," I said, "I must confess."

"Tight!" cried Catherine in