“Would it help,” Betty suggested gently, “if you told us about it?”

The old lady drew her gaze from the window and let it rest on the sweet, sympathetic young face, and she nodded slowly.

“I guess maybe it would,” she agreed, taking a handkerchief from the pocket in her dress and wiping her eyes.  “You see, I never have told anybody for years and years, and if it hadn’t been for this war I suppose I should have gone right on not telling anybody for the rest of my life.  Of course the Yates and Baldwins and all the folks that lived around us knew it, so there was no use telling them—­” Her voice trailed off and her eyes sought the window with its vista of parade ground and low, roughly built barracks buildings.

The girls looked at her.  Never in their lives, they thought, had they been so thoroughly interested in anything as they were in the secret sorrow of this gentle old lady, the sorrow that brought that strange cloud of unhappiness every time she mentioned this son of hers who had run away.

“He must have been a pretty ungrateful sort,” thought Mollie resentfully, “to have run away from a mother who loved him like that.”

Once more the old lady drew her eyes from the window and fixed them on the circle of eager young faces.

“I suppose young things like you couldn’t be expected to understand,” she went on, “and yet perhaps you’ll be interested more than other folks, ’count of your having met so many young boys.”

“Oh, we are interested,” they cried in chorus, at which the old woman’s face lighted up and she went on with more cheerfulness.

“Well, to begin with,” she said, “we lived way at t’other end o’ the world.  Danestown, it was called, and my husband—­better man never breathed—­died when my little boy was only four years old.  I wasn’t so young any more, for Willie was the youngest—­the others had all died when they was babies—­and Willie’s pa and me was getting along in years when he come to us—­the dearest, sweetest, prettiest baby you ever set your eyes on.

“Well, we had managed to save some little money, though ’twasn’t over much at best, and with me workin’ on the farm week days and Sundays, we managed to get along pretty well.  An’ I was savin’ pennies—­” Here the old voice trembled and nearly broke, so that it was some minutes before the speaker could go on.

The girls tried hard to think of something to say, but as everything that came to them sounded flat and inappropriate, they kept a sympathetic silence—­which was perhaps the best they could have done, after all.

“As I was sayin’,” the old voice continued after a while, “I was squeezin’ every little penny I could from the bare necessities to lay aside for the boy.  You see, it had been his father’s wish that Willie should be given the chance neither of us had ever had to get some schoolin’ and have his chance in the world.  I was hopin’ that by the time the boy grew up I might maybe have enough to send him to college.