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About this time the Weeping Scion was finding things very different, indeed, from Broadway, having been shifted to a specially wet and muddy section of France; and was taking them as he found them. That is to say, he had learned the prime lesson of war.

“And he’s been made corporal,” announced the Little Red Doctor with satisfaction.

“That sounds encouraging,” remarked the Bonnie Lassie. “How did it happen?”

“He went over on one of the ‘flu ships,’ and when the epidemic began to mow ’em down there was a kind of panic. From what I can make out, the Scion kept his head and his nerve, and made good. A corporal’s stripes aren’t much, but they’re something.”

Better was to come. There was high triumph in the Little Red Doctor’s expression when he came to my bench with the glad tidings of young David’s promotion to a sergeantcy.

“While it’s very gratifying,” I remarked, “it doesn’t seem to me an epoch-making event.”

“Doesn’t it!” retorted my friend. “That’s because of your abysmal military ignorance, Dominie. Let me tell you how it is in our army. A fellow can get himself made a captain by pull, or a major by luck, or a colonel by desk-work, or a general by having a fine martial figure, but to get yourself made a sergeant, by Gosh, you’ve got to show the stuff. You’ve got to be a man. You’ve got to have–“

“Are you going to tell her?” interrupted the Bonnie Lassie who had been sent for to share the news.

The Little Red Doctor fell suddenly grave. “She’s another matter,” he said. “I don’t think I shall.”

Matters were going forward with Mayme–beg her pardon, Mary McCartney, too.

“Better and more of it,” she wrote the Bonnie Lassie. “They rang me in on one of their local Red Cross shows to do a monologue. Was I a hit? Say, I got more flowers than a hearse! You’ve got to remember, though, that they deliver flowers by the car-load out here. And the local stock company has made me an offer. Ingenue parts. There is not the money that I might get in the pictures, but the chance is better. So Marie Courtenay moves on to the legit.–I mean the spoken drama. Look out for me on Broadway later!”

In the correspondence from Sergeant Berthelin there came a long hiatus followed by a curt bit of official information: “Seriously wounded.” The Little Red Doctor brought the news to me, with a queer expression on his face.

“It doesn’t look good, Dominie,” he said. “You know, my old friend, Death, is a shrewd picker. He’s got an eye for men.” He mused, rubbing his tousled, brickish locks with a nervous hand. “I was getting to kind of like that young pup,” he muttered moodily.

The saying that no news is good news was surely concocted by some one who never chafed through day after lengthening day for that which does not come. But in the end it did come, in the form of a scrawl from the Weeping Scion himself. He was mending, but very slowly, and they said it would be a long time–months, perhaps–before he could get back to the front. Meantime, they were still picking odds and ends, chiefly metallic, out of various parts of his system.

“I’m one of the guys you read about that came over here to collect souvenirs,” he commented. “Well, I’ve got all I need of ’em. They can have the rest. All I want now is to get back and present a few to Fritzie before the show is over.”

Thereafter the Little Red Doctor exhibited, but read to us only in small parts, quite bulky communications from overseas. Some of them, it became known, he was forwarding to our little Mary, out in the Far West. With her answer came the solution.

“Some of the ‘Grass and Asphalt’ sketches are wonders; some not so good. I am going to try out ‘Doggy’ if I can find a poodle with enough intelligence to support me. But you need not have been so mysterious, Doc, about your ‘young amateur writer who seems to have some talent.’ Did you think I would not know it was David? Why, bless your dear, silly heart, I told him some of those stories myself. But how does he get a chance to write them? Is he back on this side? Or is he invalided? Or what? Tell me. I want to know about him. You do not have to worry about my–well, my infatuation for him, any more. He was a pretty boy, though, wasn’t he? But I have seen too many of that kind in the picture game. I’m spoiled for them. How I would love to smear some of their pretty, smirky faces! They give me a queer feeling in my breakfast. Excuse me: I forgot I was a lady. But don’t say ‘pretty’ to me any more. I’m through. At that, you were all wrong about Buddy. He was a lot decenter than you thought: only he was brought up wrong. Give him my love as one pal to another. I hope he don’t come back a He-ro. I’m offen he-roes, too. Excuse again!”