For the most part they were lying on one or other of the five battle fronts of the war.

Others had found service in other spheres.
Only one was still in his home town, poor old Phil Amory, Frances' brother, half-blind in his darkened room, but to bring anything of his own heart burden to that brave soul seemed sacrilege or worse.

True enough, he was passing through the new and thrilling experience of making acquaintance with his father.

But old Grant Maitland was a hard man to know, and they were too much alike in their reserve and in their poverty of self-expression to make mutual acquaintance anything but a slow and in some ways a painful process.
Hence in Maitland's heart there was an almost extravagant gratitude toward this young generous-hearted girl whose touch had thrilled his heart and whose voice with its passionate note of loyal and understanding comradeship still sang like music in his soul, "Always and always, Captain Jack, and evermore." "By Jove, I have got to find some way of playing up to that," he said aloud, as he turned from the gravelled driveway into the street.

And in the months that followed he was to find that the search to which he then committed himself was to call for the utmost of the powers of soul which were his..