“You know how the war dragged, four years of it—­and much of the time that Massachusetts regiment was in swamp and field, on the edge of fever-breeding streams, never very well fed, cold in winter, hot in summer.

“They were given for medicine quinine and—­whiskey.  It kept them alive.  Sometimes it kept them warm, sometimes it lifted them above reality and granted them a moment’s reckless happiness.

“It was all wrong, of course.  I am making no plea for its rightness; and it unchained wild beasts in some of the men.  Your father for many years kept his chained, but the beasts were there.

“He was almost fifty when I married him, and he was not a General.  That title was given to him during the Spanish War.  I was twenty when I came here a bride.  There was no deception on your father’s part.  He told me of the dragon he fought—­he told me that he hoped with God’s help and mine to conquer.  And I hoped, too, Derry.  I did more than that.  I was so sure of him—­my King could do no wrong.

“But the day came when he went on one of those desolate pilgrimages where you and I so often followed in later years.  I am not going to try to tell you how we fought together, Derry; how I learned with such agony of soul that a man’s will is like wax in the fire of temptation—­oh, Derry, Derry—.

“I am telling you this for more reasons than one.  What your father has been you might be.  With all your ideals there may be in you some heritage of weakness, of appetite.  Wild beasts can conquer you, too, if you let them in.  And that’s why I have preached and prayed.  That’s why I’ve kept you from that which overcame your father.  You are no better, no stronger, than he was in the glory of his youth.  But I have barred the doors against the flaming dragon.

“I have no words eloquent enough to tell you of his care of me, his consideration, his devotion.  Yet nothing of all this helped in those strange moods that came upon him.  Then you were forgotten, I was forgotten, the world was forgotten, and he let everything go—.

“I have kept what I have suffered to some extent from the world.  If people have pitied they have had the grace at least not to let me see.  The tragedy has been that you should have been sacrificed to it, your youth shadowed.  But what could I do?  I felt that you must know, must see, and I felt, too, that the salvation of the father might be accomplished through the son.

“And so I let you go out into the night after him, I let you know that which should, perhaps, have been hidden from you.  But I loved him, Derry—­I loved you—­I did the best I could for both of you.

“And now because of the past, I plead for the future.  I want you to stay with him, Derry.  No matter what happens I beg that you will stay—­for the sake of the boy who was once like you, for the sake of the man who held your mother always close to his heart, for the sake of the mother who in Heaven holds you to your promise.”