rified me like the presence of something
awful. I stood speechless. He looked at me for a moment, and then
came slowly up to me, and laid his hand on my shoulder.

"Ranald," he said, "we were to have been married next year."

Before the grief of the man, mighty in its silence, my whole being was
humbled. I knew my love was not so great as his. It grew in my eyes a
pale and feeble thing; and I felt worthless in the presence of her
dead, whom alive I had loved with peaceful gladness. Elsie belonged to
Turkey, and he had lost her, and his heart was breaking. I threw my
arms round him, and wept for him, not for myself. It was thus I ceased
to be a boy.

Here, therefore, my story ends. Before I returned to the university,
Turkey had enlisted and left the place.

[Illustration]

My father's half-prophecy concerning him is now fulfilled. He is a
general. I will not tell his name. For some reason or other he had
taken his mother's, and by that he is well known. I have never seen
him, or heard from him, since he left my father's service; but I am
confident that if ever we meet, it will be as old and true friends.

End of Project Gutenberg's Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, by George MacDonald

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