have happened to stand at that corner at that particular moment and been one to participate in this later tragedy?  Oh, the beautiful face of the suffering girl!  Fear and sorrow and suffering and death everywhere!  Wittemore hurrying to his dying mother!  The old woman lying on her bed of pain!  But there had been glory in that dark old room when he left it, the glory of a Presence!  Ah!  Where was the Presence now?  How could He bear all this?  The Christ!  And could He not change it if He would—­make the world a happy place instead of this dark and dreadful thing that it was?  For the first time the horror of war surged over his soul in its blackness.  Men dying in the trenches!  Women weeping at home for them!  Others suffering and bleeding to death out in the open, the cold or the storm!  How could God let it all be?  His wondering soul cried out, “Lord, if Thou hadst been here!”

It was the old question that used to come up in the class-room, yet now, strangely enough, he began to feel there was an answer to it somewhere; an answer wherewith he would be satisfied when he found it.

It seemed an eternity of thought through which he passed as he crossed and recrossed the street and was back in the tiny room where life waited on death.  It was another eternity while the doctor worked again over the boy.  But at last he stood back, shaking his head and blinking the tears from his kind, tired, blue eyes.

“It’s no use,” he said, gruffly, turning his head away.  “He’s gone!”

It was then the girl brushed him aside and sank to her knees beside the little cot.

“Aleck!  Aleck!  Darling brother!  Can’t you speak to your Bonnie just once more before you go?” she called, clearly, distinctly, as if to a child who was far on his way hence.  And then once again pitifully: 

“Oh, darling brother!  You’re all I had left!  Let me hear you call me Bonnie just once more before you go to mother!”

But the childish lips lay still and white, and the lips of the girl looking down upon the little quiet form grew whiter also as she looked.

“Oh, my darling!  You have gone!  You will never call me any more!  And you were all I had!  Good-by!” And she stooped and kissed the boy’s lips with a finality that wrung the hearts of the onlookers.  They knew she had forgotten their presence.

The doctor stepped into the hall.  The tears were rolling down his cheeks.  “It’s tough luck!” he said in an undertone to Courtland.

The young man turned away to hide the sudden convulsion that seemed coming to his own face.  Then he heard the girl’s voice again, lower, as if she were talking confidentially to one who stood close at hand.

“Oh Christ, will You go with little Aleck and see that he is not afraid till he gets safe home?  And will You help me somehow to bear his leaving me alone?”

The doctor was wiping away the tears with a great, soiled handkerchief.  The girl rose calmly, white and controlled, facing them as if she remembered them for the first time.