“Good-by, son—­good luck!”

“Good-by, Dad.  See you when I get leave!”

That was all.  We were not allowed to know more than that he was ordered to France.  Whereabouts in the long trench line he would be sent we were not told.  “Somewhere in France.”  That phrase, that had been dinned so often into our ears, had a meaning for us now.

And now, indeed, our days and nights were anxious ones.  The war was in our house as it had never been before.  I could think of nothing but my boy.  And yet, all the time I had to go on.  I had to carry on, as John was always bidding his men do.  I had to appear daily before my audiences, and laugh and sing, that I might make them laugh, and so be better able to do their part.

They had made me understand, my friends, by that time, that it was really right for me to carry on with my own work.  I had not thought so at first.  I had felt that it was wrong for me to be singing at such a time.  But they showed me that I was influencing thousands to do their duty, in one way or another, and that I was helping to keep up the spirit of Britain, too.

“Never forget the part that plays, Harry,” my friends told me.  “That’s the thing the Hun can’t understand.  He thought the British would be poor fighters because they went into action with a laugh.  But that’s the thing that makes them invincible.  You’ve your part to do in keeping up that spirit.”

So I went on but it was with a heavy heart, oftentimes.  John’s letters were not what made my heart heavy.  There was good cheer in everyone of them.  He told us as much as the censor’s rules would let him of the front, and of conditions as he found them.  They were still bad—­cruelly bad.  But there was no word of complaint from John.

The Germans still had the best of us in guns in those days, although we were beginning to catch up with them.  And they knew more about making themselves comfortable in the trenches than did our boys.  No wonder!  They spent years of planning and making ready for this war.  And it has not taken us so long, all things considered, to catch up with them.

John’s letters were cheery and they came regularly, too, for a time.  But I suppose it was because they left out so much, because there was so great a part of my boy’s life that was hidden from me, that I found myself thinking more and more of John as a wee bairn and as a lad growing up.

He was a real boy.  He had the real boy’s spirit of fun and mischief.  There was a story I had often told of him that came to my mind now.  We were living in Glasgow.  One drizzly day, Mrs. Lauder kept John in the house, and he spent the time standing at the parlor window looking down on the street, apparently innocently interested in the passing traffic.

In Glasgow it is the custom for the coal dealers to go along the streets with their lorries, crying their wares, much after the manner of a vegetable peddler in America.  If a housewife wants any coal, she goes to the window when she hears the hail of the coal man, and holds up a finger, or two fingers, according to the number of sacks of coal she wants.