“When we all gather round the old fireside
       And the fond mother kisses her son—­”

Were they not cruel words for me to have to sing, who knew that his mother could never kiss my son again?  They brought it all back to me!  My son was gone—­he would never come back with the laddies who had fought and won!

For a moment I could not go on.  I was choking.  The tears were in my Eyes, and my throat was choked with sobs.  But the music went on, and the chorus took up the song, and between the singers and the orchestra they covered the break my emotion had made.  And in a little space I was able to go on with the next verse, and to carry on until my part in the show was done for the night.  But I still wondered how it was that they had not had to ring down the curtain upon me, and that Tom Valiance and the others had been right and I the one that was wrong!

Ah, weel, I learned that night what many and many another Briton had learned, both at home and in France—­that you can never know what you can do until you have to find it out!  Yon was the hardest task ever I had to undertake, but for my boy’s sake, and because they had made me understand that it was what he would have wanted me to do, I got through with it.

They rose to me again, and cheered and cheered, after I had finished singing “The Laddies Who Fought and Won.”  And there were those who called to me for a speech, but so much I had to deny them, good though they had been to me, and much as I loved them for the way they had received me.  I had no words that night to thank them, and I could not have spoken from that stage had my life depended upon it.  I could only get through, after my poor fashion, with my part in the show.

But the next night I did pull myself together, and I was able to say a few words to the audience—­thanks that were simply and badly put, it may be, but that came from the bottom of my overflowing heart.

CHAPTER X

I had not believed it possible.  But there I was, not only back at work, back upon the stage to which I thought I had said good-by forever, but successful as I had thought I could never be again.  And so I decided that I would remain until the engagement of “Three Cheers” closed.  But my mind was made up to retire after that engagement.  I felt that I had done all I could, and that it was time for me to retire, and to cease trying to make others laugh.  There was no laughter in my heart, and often and often, that season, as I cracked my merriest jokes, my heart was sore and heavy and the tears were in my eyes.

But slowly a new sort of courage came to me.  I was able to meet my friends again, and to talk to them, of myself and of my boy.  I met brother officers of his, and I heard tales of him that gave me a new and even greater pride in him than I had known before.  And my friends begged me to carry on in every way.