Almighty God, to whom we prayed, was kind, and He was pitiful and merciful.  For presently He brought us both a sort of sad composure.  Presently He assuaged our grief a little, and gave us the strength that we must have to meet the needs of life and the thought of going on in a world that was darkened by the loss of the boy in whom all our thoughts and all our hopes had been centred.  I thanked God then, and I thank God now, that I have never denied Him nor taken His name in vain.

For God gave me great thoughts about my boy and about his death.  Slowly, gradually, He made me to see things in their true light, and He took away the sharp agony of my first grief and sorrow, and gave me a sort of peace.

John died in the most glorious cause, and he died the most glorious death, it may be given to a man to die.  He died for humanity.  He died for liberty, and that this world in which life must go on, no matter how many die, may be a better world to live in.  He died in a struggle against the blackest force and the direst threat that has appeared against liberty and humanity within the memory of man.  And were he alive now, and were he called again to-day to go out for the same cause, knowing that he must meet death—­as he did meet it—­he would go as smilingly and as willingly as he went then.  He would go as a British soldier and a British gentleman, to fight and die for his King and his country.  And I would bid him go.

I have lived through much since his death.  They have not let me take a rifle or a sword and go into the trenches to avenge him. . . .  But of that I shall tell you later.

Ah, it was not at once that I felt so!  In my heart, in those early days of grief and sorrow, there was rebellion, often and often.  There were moments when in my anguish I cried out, aloud:  “Why?  Why?  Why did they have to take John, my boy—­my only child?”

But God came to me, and slowly His peace entered my soul.  And He made me see, as in a vision, that some things that I had said and that I had believed, were not so.  He made me know, and I learned, straight from Him, that our boy had not been taken from us forever as I had said to myself so often since that telegram had come.

He is gone from this life, but he is waiting for us beyond this life.  He is waiting beyond this life and this world of wicked war and wanton cruelty and slaughter.  And we shall come, some day, his mother and I, to the place where he is waiting for us, and we shall all be as happy there as we were on this earth in the happy days before the war.

My eyes will rest again upon his face.  I will hear his fresh young voice again as he sees me and cries out his greeting.  I know what he will say.  He will spy me, and his voice will ring out as it used to do.  “Hello, Dad!” he will call, as he sees me.  And I will feel the grip of his young, strong arms about me, just as in the happy days before that day that is of all the days of my life the most terrible and the most hateful in my memory—­the day when they told me that he had been killed.