Her fixed eyes were full of thought.
"It was all that here," she said.

"One depressing morning I had a telegram from Bob, 'Spion Kop taken'-- " "So Bob," I nodded, "had it as badly as everybody else!" "Worse," declared Catherine, her eye hardening; "it was all I could do to keep him at Cambridge, though he had only just gone up.

He would have given up everything and flown to the Front if I had let him." And she wore the inexorable face with which I could picture her standing in his way; and in Catherine I could admire that dogged look and all it spelt, because a great passion is always admirable.

The passion of Catherine's life was her boy, the only son of his mother, and she a widow.

It had been so when he was quite small, as I remembered it with a pinch of jealousy startling as a twinge from an old wound.