o on pretending to command here, with all this awful
responsibility of the fighting that must come soon. I know that I can't
bear it--that I must break down--that I have broken down. I can't go on
with it; I'm far too young. Only a boy, you see, and I feel now more
like a girl, for I believe I could lie down and cry at the thought of
the wounds and death and horrors to come. Oh, mother, mother! I'm only
a poor pitiful coward after all."

"God send our poor distressed country a hundred thousand of such poor
pitiful cowards to uphold the right," said Lady Royland, softly, as she
drew her son more tightly to her swelling breast. "Hush, hush, my boy!
it is your mother speaks. There, rest here as you used to rest when you
were the tiny little fellow whose newly opened eyes began to know me,
whose pink hands felt upward to touch my face. You a coward! Why, my
darling, can you not understand?"

"Yes, I understand," he groaned, as he clung to her, "that it is my own
dear mother trying to speak comfort to me in my degradation and shame.
Mother, mother! I would not have believed I was such a pitiful cur as
this."

"No," she said, softly; "I am speaking truth. You do not understand
that after the work and care of all this terrible time of preparation,
ending in the great demands made upon you to-day, the strain has been
greater than your young nature can bear. Bend the finest sword too far,
Roy, and it will break. You are overdone--worn-out. It is not as you
think."

"Ah! it is you who do not know, mother," he said, bitterly. "I am not
fit to lead."

"Indeed! you think so?" she said, pressing her lips to his wet, cold
brow. "You say this because you look forward with horror to the
bloodshed to come."

"Yes; it is dreadful. I was so helpless to-night, and I shall be losing
men through my ignorance."

"Helpless to-night? But you beat the enemy off."

"No, no--Ben Martlet's doing from beginning to end."

"Perhaps. The work of an old trained man of war, who has ridden to the
fight a score of times with your father, and now your brave father's
son's right-hand--a man who worships you, and who told me only to-day,
with the tears in his eyes, how proud he was of that gallant boy--of
you."

"Ben said that--of me?"

"Yes, my boy; and do you think with all his experience he cannot read
you through and through?"

"No, mother, he can't--he can't," said the lad, despondently; "no one
can know me as I do."