When Dicky spoke at last, it was with just the right shade of cordial acquiescence in his voice.

“Of course you must go to see her,” he said, “but are you sure you’re feeling fit enough?  It will try your nerves, I imagine.”

Far better than Dicky could guess I knew what the day’s ordeal would be.  Mrs. Stewart had been very fond of my brother-cousin.  With my mother, she had hoped that he and I would some day care for each other.  With her queer partisan ideas of loyalty, when Dicky had been so cruelly unjust to me about Jack, she had wished me to divorce Dicky and marry Jack, even though Jack himself had never whispered such a solution of my life’s problem.  That she believed me to be responsible for his going to the war I knew.  I dreaded inexpressibly the idea of facing her.

But when, after a rather silent trip to the city with Dicky, I stood again in Mrs. Stewart’s little upstairs sitting-room, I found only a very sorrowful old woman, not a reproachful one.

“I thought you’d come today,” she said, and her voice was tired, dispirited.  I felt a sudden compunction seize me that my visits to her had been so few since Jack’s going.

“I couldn’t have kept away,” I said, and then my old friend dropped my hand, which she had been holding, and, sinking into a chair, put her wrinkled old hands up to her face.  I saw the slow tears trickling through her fingers, and I knelt by her side and drew her head against my shoulder, comforting her as she once had comforted me.

Mrs. Stewart was never one to give way to emotion, and it was but a few moments before she drew herself erect, wiped her eyes, and said quietly: 

“I’ll show you the cablegram.”

She went to her desk, and drew out the message, clipped, abbreviated in the puzzling fashion of cablegrams: 

  “Regret inform you, Bickett killed, action French front.  Details
  later.”

  (Signed) “Caillard.”

“Caillard?  Caillard?” Where had I heard that name?  Then I suddenly remembered.  Paul Caillard was the friend with whom Jack had gone across the ocean to the Great War.  I examined the paper carefully.

“I thought Dicky said you received the usual official notification,” I remarked.

“That’s what I told him,” she replied.  “That’s it.”

“But this isn’t an official message,” I persisted.

“Why isn’t it?”

I explained the difference haltingly, and spoke of the wonderful system of identification in the French army, with every man tagged with a metal identification check.

“You will probably receive the official notification in a few days,” I commented.

A queer, startled expression flashed into her face.  She opened her mouth, as if to speak, and then, looking at me sharply, closed it again.  Reaching out her hand for the cablegram, she folded it mechanically, as if thinking of something far away, then going to her desk, put it away, and stood as if thinking deeply for two or three minutes, which seemed an hour to me.