, Derry;
plus, perhaps, a few of his own.

"You know how the war dragged, four years of it--and much of the time
that Massachusetts regiment was in swamp and field, on the edge of
fever-breeding streams, never very well fed, cold in winter, hot in
summer.

"They were given for medicine quinine and--whiskey. It kept them
alive. Sometimes it kept them warm, sometimes it lifted them above
reality and granted them a moment's reckless happiness.

"It was all wrong, of course. I am making no plea for its rightness;
and it unchained wild beasts in some of the men. Your father for many
years kept his chained, but the beasts were there.

"He was almost fifty when I married him, and he was not a General.
That title was given to him during the Spanish War. I was twenty when
I came here a bride. There was no deception on your father's part. He
told me of the dragon he fought--he told me that he hoped with God's
help and mine to conquer. And I hoped, too, Derry. I did more than
that. I was so sure of him--my King could do no wrong.

"But the day came when he went on one of those desolate pilgrimages
where you and I so often followed in later years. I am not going to
try to tell you how we fought together, Derry; how I learned with such
agony of soul that a man's will is like wax in the fire of
temptation--oh, Derry, Derry--.

"I am telling you this for more reasons than one. What your father has
been you might be. With all your ideals there may be in you some
heritage of weakness, of appetite. Wild beasts can conquer you, too,
if you let them in. And that's why I have preached and prayed. That's
why I've kept you from that which overcame your father. You are no
better, no stronger, than he was in the glory of his youth. But I have
barred the doors against the flaming dragon.

"I have no words eloquent enough to tell you of his care of me, his
consideration, his devotion. Yet nothing of all this helped in those
strange moods that came upon him. Then you were forgotten, I was
forgotten, the world was forgotten, and he let everything go--.

"I have kept what I have suffered to some extent from the world. If
people have pitied they have had the grace at least not to let me see.
The tragedy has been that you should have been sacrificed to it, your
youth shadowed. But what could I do? I felt that you must know, must
see, and I felt, too, that the salvation of the father might be
accomplished through the so