When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was getting queer.  “She talks about the children being hers,” he said.

“Oh, well, she’s awfully fond of them,” Flora explained.  “And she’s lived her little narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats and her house.  She doesn’t know what it means to suffer as a mother suffers—­poor Sophy.”

“Um,” Baldwin grunted.

When the official notification of Eugene’s death came from the War Department Aunt Sophy was so calm that it might have appeared that Flora had been right.  She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora, and they thought that her grief would end in madness.  Sophy neglected everything to give comfort to the stricken two.

“How can you sit there like that!” Flora would rail.  “How can you sit there like that!  Even if you weren’t his mother surely you must feel something.”

“It’s the way he died that comforts me,” said Aunt Sophy.

“What difference does that make!  What difference does that make!”

This is the letter that made a difference to Aunt Sophy.  You will have to read it to understand, though you are likely to skip letters on the printed page.  You must not skip this.

     American red cross
     (Croix Rouge AMERICAINE)

     My dear Mrs. Baldwin: 

I am sure you must have been officially notified, by now, by the U.S.  War Dept. of the death of your son Lieut.  Eugene H. Baldwin.  But I want to write you what I can of his last hours.  I was with him much of that time as his nurse.  I’m sure it must mean much to a mother to hear from a woman who was privileged to be with her boy at the last.

Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassed from the fighting in the Argonne Forest.  Ordinarily we do not receive gassed patients, as they are sent to a special hospital near here.  But two nights before the Germans wrecked this hospital, so many gassed patients have come to us.

Your son was put in the officers’ ward where the doctors who examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as he had inhaled the gas so much that it was only a matter of a few hours.  I could scarcely believe that a man so big and strong as he was could not pull through.

The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were both with him.  He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not to leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good to have a woman near.  He was propped high in bed and put his head on my shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more easily.  I stayed with him all that night, though I was not on duty.  You see, his eyes also were badly burned.  But before he died he was able to see very well.  I stayed with him