“I want it, Daddy,” she said, smiling down wet-eyed on the still face. “You don’t know how much you handled it. I seem always to have seen it in your hand. No one shall touch it again but me—just yours and mine, Daddy—our little jade doll, in a pink cradle. Stay there!” she told the joss, and then sobbing, but pressing back her tears, and wiping them away when they _would_ come, that her sight might be clear for its last loving of that dear, dead face, she bent over the coffin, spending their last hour together, saying—good-by.
“Oh, Daddy—my Daddy——” The sobs came then, long and louder. Latham, watching in the hall, heard them, but he did not go to the girl; nor let any one else do so.
The spring waxed into radiant molten summer, mocking with its lush of flower-life, its trill of bird-voice, its downpouring of sunshine, the agony of the nations, and the pitiful grief in one English girl’s inconsolable heart.
Other girls lost their lovers. Never a home in England but held some bereavement now, never a heart in Christendom but nursed some ache. But most of the sorrow and suffering was ennobled and blazoned. Other girls walked proud with their memories—_his_ D.S.O. pinned in their black, the ribbon of _his_ Military Cross worn on their heart, tiny wings of tinsel, of gold, or of diamonds rising and falling with their breath, a regimental badge pinning their lace, a sailor’s button warm at a soft white throat—telling of a “boy” sleeping cold, unafraid in the North Sea, or (proudest of all these) a new wedding-ring under a little black glove—and, perhaps——
Other girls packed weekly boxes for Ruhleben, or walked the London streets and the Sussex lanes with the man on whose arm they had used to lean leaning on theirs, blinded, a leg gone, or trembling still from shell-shock, a face mutilated, broken and scarred in body, nerve-wrecked, but _hers_, hers to have and to hold, to love and to mother, to lean on her love, to respond to her shy wooing, to beget her children; to show the world, and God, how English women love.
But she—Helen—was alone. No field-card for her—no last kiss at Victoria, no trophy, no hope.
Hugh had been posted as a deserter. It was some hideous mistake, Helen knew that, but the world did not know. Hugh! Hugh dishonored, despised. She knew that he had not deserted. But what had happened? Had he been killed? Had his mind broken? That he had not taken his own life—at least not knowingly—that she knew. But what, what, then, had happened? He had disappeared from her, as from every one else—no trace—not a clue. Where was he? How was he? Did he live? Not a word came—not a whisper—not a hint. And his name was branded. _Her_ name—the name she had dreamed to wear in bridal white and in motherhood. “Mrs. Hugh Pryde”—“Helen Pryde”—how often she had written those, alone in her room—as girls will. “Mrs. Hugh Pryde,” she had liked it the better of the two, and sometimes she had held it to her dimpling, flushed face before she had burned it.