But it weren’t so easy for me. His handsome little face and his pleasant ways is as clear to me to-day as they ever was. When I sit lonely over my fire of a winter’s night—and I am a lonely man, things being as they are and the years going on—I think of him for hours in a way of my own, and make a sort of dream of him. I think of him as he lay in his cradle and we made friends when he wasn’t but a week old. I think of him as he was, with his little soldier ways about the quarters, carrying himself as military as if he’d been twenty; a-helping me in one way and another, and finding out he might be confidential, though I wasn’t nothing but a private and him a officer’s son. I think about him as he looked when he came to me in his innercent trouble that night and told me about his sister’s lover. And then I see him lying there, with the light from the east window falling on him, and I hear him saying:

“I am very fond of you, Rabbett. I always was fond of you, and I always shall be fond of you. Don’t let my hand go, Rabbett.”

Ay—and that ain’t all. I make a picture of what might have been. I sees him grown into a young man—a handsome, smart young officer—and make a picture of some beautiful young girl, and tells myself what a pretty love story they would have had betwixt them, and what a lover, and what a young husband he would have been! Why, there’s been nights when I’ve even seen little children like him, and thought they would have been fond of me, as he was. It’s made me forget where I was, and when I’d be roused up by something or other I’ve found myself choke up with something as might almost have been my heart in my throat, to think as it were only a sort of dream after all. And the captain’s youngest lies out under the stars in the churchyard, the wind a-blowing over the snow as lies on a grave as is only the grave of a child.