She ran away swiftly, not trusting herself to look back.
A moment later Ruth entered the kitchen, slowly and with downcast eyes. He was standing before the fire, awaiting her.
"Ruth," he said quietly. "I've tried to do well by your child; I'll ask you to do the same by mine."
She came to him and hung about his neck, riven with sobs, her head on his shoulder.
"O Ern!" she cried. "And is that your last word to me?"
She lifted anguished eyes to him and clung to him.
"I love them all just the same, only we been through so much together, she and me. That's where it is."
His arms were about her and he was stroking her.
"I knaw that then," he said, husky himself.
"See, they got you and each other and all the world," Ruth continued. "Little Alice got nobody only her mother."
She steadied and drew her hand across rain-blurred eyes.
"Ern," she said, deeply. "I do thank you for all your lovin kindness to that child. I've never forgot that all through--whatever it seemed."
"She's mine just as well as yours," he answered, smiling and uncertain. "Always has been. Always will be."
She pressed her lips on his with a passion that amazed him.
Then he took the boy from the cot and rocked him. The tears poured down his face. This, then, was War!--All his light-heartedness, his detachment, had gone. He was a husband and a father torn brutally away from the warmth and tenderness of the home that was so dear to him, to be tossed into the arena among wild beasts who not long since had been men just like himself, and would be men still but for the evil power of their masters to do by them as his masters had done by him. Then he put the child back and turned to say good-bye to Ruth.
The passionate wife of a few minutes since had changed now into the mother parting from her schoolboy. She took him to her heart and hugged him.
"You'll be back before you know," she told him, cooing, comforting, laughing through her tears. "They all say it'll be over soon, whatever else. A great war like this ca'an't go on. Too much of it, like."
"Please God, so," said Ernie. "It's going to be the beginning of a new life for me--for you--for all of us, as Joe says.... God keep you till we meet again."
Then he walked swiftly down the street with swimming eyes.