His tone was truculent.

Derry attempted lightness.  “You’ll be a lump of ice in the morning, Dad.  We’d have to chip you off in chunks.”

“You go home with Bronson, son, He is up there.  Go home—­”

He had once commanded a brigade.  There were moments when he was hard pushed that he remembered it.

“Go home, Derry.”

“Not till you come with me.”

“I’m not coming.”

Derry spread his rug on the icy ground.  “Sit on this and wrap up your legs—­you’ll freeze out here.”

His father did not move.  “I am puf-feckly comfa’ble.”

The General rarely got his syllables tangled.  Things at times happened to his legs, but he usually controlled his tongue.

“I am puf-feckly comfa’ble—­go home, Derry.”

“I can’t leave you, Dad.”

“I want to be left.”

He had never been quite like this.  There had been moods of rebellion, but usually he had yielded himself to his son’s guidance.

“Dad, be reasonable.”

“I’d rather sit here and freeze—­than go home with a—­coward.”

It was out at last.  It struck Derry like a whiplash.  He sprang to his feet.  “You don’t mean that, Dad.  You can’t mean it.”

“I do mean it.”

“I am not a coward, and you know it.”

“Then why don’t you go and fight?”

Silence!  The only sound the chuckle of living waters beneath the ice of the little stream.

“Why don’t you go and fight like other men?”

The emphasis was insulting.  Derry had only one idea—­to escape from that taunting voice.  “You’ll be sorry for this, Dad,” he flung out at white heat, and scrambled up the bank.

When he reached the bridge, he paused.  He couldn’t leave that old man down there to die of the cold—­the wind was rising and rattled in the bare trees.

But Derry’s blood was boiling.  He sat down on the parapet, thick blackness all about him.  Whatever had been his father’s shortcomings, they had always clung together—­and now they were separated by words which had cut like a knife.  It was useless to tell himself that his father was not responsible.  Out of the heart the mouth had spoken.

And there were other people who felt as his father did—­there had been Drusilla’s questions, the questions of others—­there had been, too, averted faces.  He saw the little figure in the cloak of heavenly blue as she had been the other night,—­in her gray furs as she had been this morning—­; would her face, too, be turned from him?

Words formed themselves in his mind.  He yearned to toss back at his father the taunt that was on his lips.  To fling it over the parapet, to shout it to the world—!

He had never before felt the care of his father a sacrifice.  There had been humiliating moments, hard moments, but always he had been sustained by a sense of the rightness of the thing that he was doing and of its necessity.