Page:War; or, What happens when one loves one's enemy, John Luther Long, 1913.djvu/334

WAR Come home! It's like a cannon ball in my breast. Why, she don't seem to know, like we do, that it's fifty years! Nor that, if he should come, he would be an old man. She thinks of him with that baby face and dimples, in that zouave uniform!

Sometimes I shake my head and say:

"Mother, it's a long, long time!"

But that doesn't phase her. She answers:

"Yes. But he'll come. He's a good boy. He knows I am waiting. He knows he is all I have. So I keep his bed ready made up, and his plate at the table, so that when he comes it will all be as it was—everything ready for him."

Only a little while ago she took to her bed. Then a little interrogation-point came in the dim blue eyes when she asked me. And the form of the question was:

"Don't you think he'll soon come?"

No, I don't. For I saw him disappear close upon the enemy's guns that Sunday morning. 318