That winter I was in the big revue at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in London, that was called “Three Cheers.”  It was one of the gay shows that London liked because it gave some relief from the war and made the Zeppelin raids that the Huns were beginning to make so often now a little easier to bear.  And it was a great place for the men who were back from France.  It was partly because of them that I could go on as I did.  We owed them all we could give them.  And when they came back from the mud and the grime and the dreariness of the trenches, they needed something to cheer them up—­needed the sort of production we gave them.  A man who has two days’ leave in London does not want to see a serious play or a problem drama, as a rule.  He wants something light, with lots of pretty girls and jolly tunes and people to make him laugh.  And we gave him that.  The house was full of officers and men, night after night.

Soon word came from John that he was to have leave, just after Christmas, that would bring him home for the New Year’s holidays.  His mother went home to make things ready, for John was to be married when he got his leave.  I had my plans all made.  I meant to build a wee hoose for the two of them, near our own hoose at Dunoon, so that we might be all together, even though my laddie was in a home of his own.  And I counted the hours and the days against the time when John would be home again.

While we were playing at the Shaftesbury I lived at an hotel in Southampton Row called the Bonnington.  But it was lonely for me there.  On New Year’s Eve—­it fell on a Sunday—­Tom Vallance, my brother-in-law, asked me to tea with him and his family in Clapham, where he lived.  That is a pleasant place, a suburb of London on the southwest, and I was glad to go.  And so I drove out with a friend of mine, in a taxicab, and was glad to get out of the crowded part of the city for a time.

I did not feel right that day.  Holiday times were bad, hard times for me then.  We had always made so much of Christmas, and here was the third Christmas that our boy had been away.  And so I was depressed.  And then, there had been no word for me from John for a day or two.  I was not worried, for I thought it likely that his mother or his sweetheart had heard, and had not time yet to let me know.  But, whatever the reason, I was depressed and blue, and I could not enter into the festive spirit that folk were trying to keep alive despite the war.

I must have been poor company during that ride to Clapham in the taxicab.  We scarcely exchanged a word, my friend and I. I did not feel like talking, and he respected my mood, and kept quiet himself.  I felt, at last, that I ought to apologize to him.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” I told him.  “I simply don’t want to talk.  I feel sad and lonely.  I wonder if my boy is all right?”

“Of course he is!” my friend told me.  “Cheer up, Harry.  This is a time when no news is good news.  If anything were wrong with him they’d let you know.”