Page:Our Girls.pdf/146

 to go astray and suffer, so the woman who has lost her son in the war has "a young man in all the beauty of his strength" and the pride and glory of his love for ever beside her.

That is what keeps the hearts of the mothers of Britain alive, notwithstanding all they have lost and suffered. And the heart of our British Empire, too, which is the mother of all of us, may yet find comfort in the same deep thought—that her loss may be her gain; that those of her children who died earliest may live the longest; that her vast armies that have fallen in the war may be the multitude of her invisible subjects who will rule her in the days of peace; that dark as it sometimes seems to be, even now, the sky is shot through with gleams from the morning, and that as long as the night lasts we must work on and fight on (cruelly hard as it is to say so) in the sure and certain hope that we shall be the happiest and most united people that have