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“Well, it’s a pretty severe sort of education for his parents–nineteen, an only son, and to go without seeing them again. He might at least have come home and enlisted from his own State.”

They were at the far end of the platform, facing the dark of the pine-clad ravines. Deep, odorous breaths of night wind came sighing up the slopes.

“Mother, there was something happened last winter that I never told you,” Elsie began again, with pauses. “It was so silly, and there seemed no need to speak of it. But I can’t bear not to speak now. I don’t know if it has made any difference–with Billy’s plans. It seems disloyal to tell you. But you must forget it: he’s forgotten, I am sure. He said–those silly things, you know! I couldn’t have told you then; it was too silly. And I said that I didn’t think it was for him or for me to talk about such things. It was for men and women, not boys who couldn’t even get their lessons.”

“Elsie!” Mrs. Valentin gave a little choked laugh. “Did you say that? The poor boy! Why, I thought you were such good friends!”

“He wasn’t talking friendship, mother, and I was furious with him for flunking his exams. He passed in only five out of seven. He ought to have done better than that. He’s not stupid; it’s that fatal popularity. He’s captain of this and manager of that, and they give him such a lot of money. And they pet him, too; they make excuses for him all the time. I told him he must do something before he began to have feelings. The only feeling he had any right to have was shame for his miserable record.”

“And that was all the encouragement you gave him?”

“If you call that ‘encouragement,'” said Elsie.

“You did very well, my dear; but I suppose you know it was the most intimate thing you could have said to him, the greatest compliment you could pay him. If he ever does make any sort of a record, you have given him the right to come back to you with it.”

“He will never come back to me without it,” said the girl. “But it was nothing–nothing! All idleness and nonsense, and the music after supper that went to his head.”

“I hope it was nothing more than”–Mrs. Valentin checked herself. There were things she said to her husband which sometimes threatened to slip out inadvertently when his youthful copy was near. “Well, I see nothing to be ashamed of, on your side. But such things are always a pity. They age a girl in spite of herself. And the boys–they simply forget. The rebuke does them good, but they forget to whom they owe it. It’s just one of those things that make my girlie older. But oh, how fast life comes!”

Elsie slipped her hand under her mother’s cloak, and Mrs. Valentin pressed her own down hard upon it.

“We must get aboard, dear. But I’m so glad you told me! And I didn’t mean quite what I said about Billy’s ‘going off mad.’ He has given all he had to give, poor boy; why he gave it is his own affair.”

“I hope–what I told you–has made no difference about his coming home. It’s stupid of me to think it. But hard words come back, don’t they, mother? Hard words–to an old friend!”

“Billy is all right, dear; and it was so natural you should be tried with him! ‘For to be wroth with one we'”–Mrs. Valentin had another of her narrow escapes. “Come, there is the porter waiting for us.”

“Mother,” said Elsie sternly, “please don’t misunderstand. I should never have spoken of this if I had been ‘wroth’ with him–in that way.”

“Of course not, dear; I understand. And it would never do, anyway, for father doesn’t like the blood.”

“Father doesn’t like the–what, mother?”

Elsie asked the question half an hour later, as they sat in an adjoining section, waiting for their berths to be made up.