you on the ice again. Oh, it would be wonderful! Of course, the old team
wouldn't be there--Herbert and Phil and Andy. Why! You are the only
one left! And Rupert." She added the name doubtfully. "It WOULD be
different! oh, so different! Oh! I don't wonder you don't care, Captain
Jack. I won't wonder--" There was a little choke in the young voice. "I
see it now--"

"I think you understand, Patsy, and you are a little brick," said
Captain Jack in a low, hurried tone. "And I am going to try. Anyway,
whatever happens, we will be pals."

The girl caught his arm tight in her clasped hands and in a low voice
she said, "Always and always, Captain Jack, and evermore." And till they
drew up at the Rectory door no more was said.

Maitland drove homeward through the mellow autumn evening with a warmer,
kindlier glow in his heart than he had known through all the dreary
weeks that had followed his return from the war. For the war had wrought
desolation for him in a home once rich in the things that make life
worth while, by taking from it his mother, whose rare soul qualities had
won and held through her life the love, the passionate, adoring love
of her sons, and his twin brother, the comrade, chum, friend of all his
days, with whose life his own had grown into a complete and ideal
unity, deprived of whom his life was left like a body from whose raw and
quivering flesh one-half had been torn away.

The war had left his life otherwise bruised and maimed in ways known
only to himself.

Returning thus from his soul-devastating experience of war to find