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Elsie trailed about the shops with her mother, not greatly interested in shirt-waists or bargains in French underclothing.

The war pressure seemed to close in upon them as they left the mid-West and drew toward the coast once more. The lists from El Caney were throbbing over the wires, and the country, so long immune from peril and suffering, was awakening to the cost of victory. There was a terrible flippancy in the irrepressible spirit of trade which had seized upon the nation’s emblems, freshly consecrated in the blood of her sons, and was turning them to commercial account,–advertising, in symbols of death and priceless devotion, that ribbons or soap or candy were for sale. The flag was, so to speak, dirt-cheap. You could wear it in a hatband or a necktie; you could deface it, or tear it in two, in opening an envelope addressed to you by your bootmaker.

Elsie cast hunted eyes on the bulletin boards. She knew by heart that first list after Las Guasimas. One glance had burned it in forever. It had become one of the indelible scars of a lifetime. Yet those were the names of strangers. If a whiff from an avalanche can fell trees a mile away, how if the avalanche strike you?

They returned to their hotel, exhausted, yet excited, by the heat; and Mrs. Valentin admonished herself of what our boys must be suffering in that “unimaginable climate,” and she entered into details, forgetting to spare Elsie, till the girl turned a sickly white.

It was then the bishop’s card was sent up–their own late bishop, much mourned and deplored because he had been transferred to an Eastern diocese. There could be no one so invariably welcome, who knew so well, without effort, how to touch the right chord, whether in earnest or in jest that sometimes hid a deeper earnest. His manner at first usually hovered between the two, your own mood determining where the emphasis should rest. He had brought with him the evening paper, but he kept it folded in his hand.

“So you are pilgrims to Mecca,” he said, looking from mother to daughter with his gentle, musing smile. “But are you not a little early for the Eastern schools?”

“There are the home visits first, and the clothes,” said Mrs. Valentin.

“And where do you stop, and for how long?”

“Boston, for one year, Bishop, and then we go abroad for a year, perhaps.”

“Bless me! what has Elsie done that she should be banished from home for two years?”

“She takes her mother with her.”

“Yes; that is half of the home. Perhaps that’s as much as one girl ought to expect.”

“The fathers are so busy, Bishop.”

“Yes; the fathers do seem to be busy. So Elsie is going East to be finished? And how old is she now? How does she presume to account for the fact that she is taller than her mother and nearly as tall as her bishop?”

Elsie promptly placed herself at the bishop’s side and “measured,” glancing over her shoulder at him in the glass. He turned and gravely placed his hand upon her head.

“I thought of writing to you at one time,” said Mrs. Valentin, “but of course you cannot keep us all on your mind. We are a ‘back number.'”

“She thought I would have forgotten who these Valentins were,” said the bishop, smiling.

“No; but you cannot keep the thread of all our troubles–the sheep of the old flock and the lambs of the new. I have had a thousand minds lately about Elsie, but this was the original plan, made years ago, when we were young and sure about things. Don’t you think young lives need room, Bishop? Oughtn’t we to seek to widen their mental horizons?”

“The horizons widen, they widen of themselves, Mrs. Valentin–very suddenly sometimes, and beyond our ken.” The bishop’s voice had struck a deeper note; he paused and looked at Elsie with eyes so kind and tender that the girl choked and turned away. “This war is rather a widening business, and California is getting her share. Our boys of the First, for instance,–you see I still call them our boys,–what were they doing a year ago, and what are they doing now? I’ll be bound half of them a year ago didn’t know how ‘Philippines’ was spelled.”