Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/170

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away from Jock the story in her eyes. After a little her lips took it on. "We had a few hours together. And that was all. He went away, to France, and I went home. And waited and waited and waited. . . . That was the third stage. Then I thought, 'It'll be all right. God will send him back safe to me.' You see I believed in God in those days, Jock Hamill. I had—the most infinite faith.

"Well—God played with me, that was all. He didn't kill Paul in the war, but He killed him later. On the boat coming home—just a day or two away from my arms. Influenza. And they buried him at sea. . . . I didn't know, of course, and I was there to meet the ship that brought his battalion back. In Boston. So happy, and all in new clothes. Almost two years I'd waited. . . . Did you ever hear of the Mothers' Boat, Jock Hamill? When the big transports got in, sometimes they'd send a little tug down the harbor to meet them, with mothers, and sweethearts, and wives, I was on one of those little tugs. Early one morning. Foggy and wet and cold—in March, it was. You coufdn't see the land, nor anything but gray fog and gray water all around. They took the tug boat out a way and then they let it drift, and everybody stood so quiet and tense, staring all in one direction. . . . I don't know how long we were there. A piece of forever. . . . And then finally we began to hear a foghorn, and bye and bye we could see the faint gray outlines of the transport through the mist. And they started our engine up again, and we went toward it. And when we got nearer there was a new color out of the gray. Brown. Khaki. Great lines of it—I could hardly see them, I was crying so. For joy.

"They brought the tug so close to the liner that there was only a narrow span of water between, and the liner