It was the first sorrow of Donald’s life, but six months later he was to suffer a yet more crushing blow in the loss of his dearly loved mother.  The loss of his best confidante and his ideal seemed at first to stun the boy completely, and to cast him in upon himself entirely.  Later on he remembered that he had felt at that time that he had nothing to say to any one.  He had wondered what the others could have thought of him, and had thought how dreadfully unresponsive they must be finding him.  His sister should have been of some use.  But she can only think of herself then as of some strange figure, veiled and petrified with grief—­grief not for her mother, but for the young hero whose magnetism had thrilled through every moment of her life—­yet pointing onwards, with mutely insistent finger, to the path that her hero had trodden.  And Donald, dazed also himself by grief—­though from another cause—­of his own accord, placed his first uncertain steps on the road that leads to military glory.  No “voice” warned him as yet, and he had no other decisive leading.

If his sister failed him then, his father did not.  Of him Donald wrote recently to an aunt, “Papa’s letters to me are a heritage whose value can never diminish.  His was indeed the pen of a ready writer, and in his case, as in the case of many rather reserved people, the pen did more justice to the man than the tongue.  I never knew him until Mamma’s death, when the weekly letter from him took the place of hers, and never stopped till I came home.”

At Rugby, Donald was accounted a dreamer.  Without the outlet he had hitherto had for his confidences and his thoughts no doubt the tendency to dream grew upon him.  “Behold this dreamer cometh,” was actually said of him by one of his masters.

Nevertheless there were happy times when youth asserted itself and boyish friendships were made.  In work he did well, for he entered the sixth form at the early age of 161/2, and was thereby enabled, though he left young, to have his name painted up “in hall” below those of his three brothers, and also on his “study” door which belonged to each of the four in turn.

He entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, straight from Rugby, and before he was seventeen.  We have his word for it that he was spiritually very unhappy there, finding evils with which he was impotent to grapple, going up as he did so young from school and before he had had time to acquire a “games” reputation—­that all-important qualification for a boy if he wishes to influence his fellows.  Nevertheless youthful spirits were bound to triumph sometimes.  He was a perfectly sound and healthy, well-grown boy and a friend who was with him at “the Shop” says he can remember no apparent trace of unhappiness, and is full of tales of his jokes and his fun, his quaint caricatures and doggerel rhymes, his love of flowers and nature, his hospitalities, and his joy in getting his friends to meet and know