* * * * *

He read Mrs. Graham's note, and Mary's several times, and as he read
them, he had a longing to go to Boveyhayne again. The house at
Ballymartin was so lonely, now that his father's heavy footsteps no
longer sounded through the hall. Sometimes, forgetting that he was dead,
Henry would stop suddenly and listen as if he were listening for his
father's voice. Since his return from Dublin, he had felt his loss more
poignantly than he had before he went away. In the old days, his father
would have been at the station to meet him. There would have been a
hearty shout, and....

"I must go," he said to himself, "I must go. I can't bear to be here
now."

He went down to the village and telegraphed to Mrs. Graham telling her
that he would be with her two days later, and while he was in the post
office, the _Belfast Evening Telegraph_ came in.

"I'll take my copy with me," he said to the post-mistress, and he opened
it at once to read the news. There was a paragraph in a corner of the
paper, which caught his eye at once. It announced the death in action of
Lord Jasper Jayne.

"My God!" he said, crumpling the paper as he gaped at the announcement.

"Is it bad news, sir?" the post-mistress asked.

"A friend of mine," he answered, turning to her. "Killed at the Front!"

"Aw, dear," she said. "Aw, dear-a-dear! An' there'll be plenty more,
sir. There's young fellas away from the village, sir. My own nephew's
away. You mind him, don't you, sir! Peter Logan!..."

"Peter Logan!"

"Ay, he used to keep the forge 'til he married Matt Hamilton's niece,
an' then he took to the land. Nothin' would stop him, but to be off.
Nothin' at all would stop him. I toul' him myself the Belgians was
Catholics an' the Germans was Protestants, but nothin' would stop
him...."

"Sheila Morgan's husband," Henry murmured.

"Ay," she answered, "that was her name before she was married. He's
trainin' now, an' in a while, I suppose, he'll be off like the rest of
them. Och, ochanee, sir, isn't this a terr'ble world, wi' nothin' but
fightin' an' wringlin'? Will that be all you're wantin', sir?"

"Yes, thanks," he said.

Poor old Jimphy! They had all been contemptuous of him ... and now!...

Cecily would be free now! Oh, but what of that? Poor Jimphy! He had not
wished for much from life ... and sometimes it had seemed that he had
got much more than he needed....

"The best of us can't do more than he di