"I see it now--" "I think you understand, Patsy, and you are a little brick," said Captain Jack in a low, hurried tone.

"And I am going to try.

Anyway, whatever happens, we will be pals." The girl caught his arm tight in her clasped hands and in a low voice she said, "Always and always, Captain Jack, and evermore." And till they drew up at the Rectory door no more was said.
Maitland drove homeward through the mellow autumn evening with a warmer, kindlier glow in his heart than he had known through all the dreary weeks that had followed his return from the war.

For the war had wrought desolation for him in a home once rich in the things that make life worth while, by taking from it his mother, whose rare soul qualities had won and held through her life the love, the passionate, adoring love of her sons, and his twin brother, the comrade, chum, friend of all his days, with whose life his own had grown into a complete and ideal unity, deprived of whom his life was left like a body from whose raw and quivering flesh one-half had been torn away.
The war had left his life otherwise bruised and maimed in ways known only to himself.
Returning thus from his soul-devastating experience of war to find his life desolate and maimed in all that gave it value, he made the appalling discovery that he was left almost alone of all whom he had known and loved in past days.

For of his close friends none were left as before.