all we hope for; a better chance for every man and a better man to take the chance. They call it a symbol, they say symbols are not real things; I guess symbols are the soul of things."

If his grandfather were only alive now! He would be an old man nearing eighty (which seemed a great age to the young fellow); but he was a lad of nineteen, younger than Victor, when he first buckled on his soldier's belt and first lifted his hand to swear allegiance to the Republic. He had kept his oath; through privations and suffering and wounds and mutilation and innumerable aspects

of danger. How he would have waved and cheered to see him, the third Victor, taking his place behind the colors!

Thoughts vague and wandering and indistinct, yet glowing, throbbed through him; for hours he was awake. His companions' jests reached him now and then; that jocose flippancy with which the strong heart of America masks its molten ardor or its tenderness. "Some town, boys, not?" called one of them. "Oh, we'll give them something for the first page if we get at the greasers!"

"What a bunch they are!" Victor mused proudly with a swelling

heart. “What a country to fight for!" At last he drifted into sleep. But no sleep came all that night to his mother's fevered eyelids.

CHAPTER IV

HER FEARS

Instead of abating as the days went by, Ellen Hardy's distress of mind and grisly fears steadily waxed greater. They swelled in her soul like some noxious seed. And whenever in his frequent letters Victor mentioned his grandfather (who seemed constantly in his thoughts) an obsession of dread came on her. After all her prayers, after all her tears, all her unremitting efforts to influence her son, and to combat that dead man's strong soul, was he slipping from

her grasp? Could he who had never broken his word be wanting to break it now?

More than once in the letters which she tried pathetically to make interesting to him, disguising her secret turmoil under a sprightliness foreign to her (for she was quite too earnest a creature to joke very much) more than once by implication rather than directly she tried to suggest to him the question which she dared not put. Once she wrote: "Madam Vibert had such an interesting paper before the club yesterday; it was on the difference between American sons and French sons regarding