What a message for men going up to face the terrors and perils of the front line. "Be not anxious!"

"I was afraid," his father had said to him. That to him was inconceivable. That that gallant spirit should know terror seemed to him impossible. Yet even he had said, "I was afraid." And for the loneliness, what a message he now had. In their loneliness men cried out for the presence of a friend, and the Master had said:

"When ye pray, pray to your Father. Your Father knoweth. When ye pray, say, 'Our Father'!" And he had missed all this. What a mess he had made of his work! How sadly misread his Master's teaching and misinterpreted his Master's spirit!

Barry looked down upon the grave at his feet.

"But you knew, dad, you knew!" he whispered.

For the first time since he had become a chaplain, he thought of his work with gratitude and eagerness. He longed to see his men again. He had something to tell them. It was this: that God to them was like their fathers, their mothers, their brothers, their friends; only infinitely more loving, and without their faults.

With his head high and his feet light upon the earth, he returned to the R. A. M. C. Hospital, where he found Harry Hobbs, with his handbag and a letter from his O. C.

"Take a few days off," said the O. C. "We all sympathise with you.

We miss you and shall be glad to see you, but take a few days now for yourself."

Barry was greatly touched, but he had only one desire now, and that was to return to his unit. His batman brought him also an order from the Assistant Director of Chaplain Service bidding him report at the earliest moment.

At Headquarters he learned that the A. D. C. S. had been in Boulogne, but had gone to Etaples, some thirty or forty miles distant, to visit the large hospitals there. He determined that to-morrow he would go to Etaples and report, after which he would proceed to his battalion.

That evening, he visited the men in the hospital, coming upon many Canadians whose joy in seeing a chaplain from their own country touched Barry to the heart. He took their messages which he promised to transmit to their folks at home, and left with them something of the serene and exultant peace that filled his own soul.

From Ewen Innes and others of the Wapiti draft, he learned something of his father's work and place in their battalion. Soldiers are not eloquent in speech, but mostly in silence. Their words halted when they came to speak of their sergeant major's soldierly qualities,--for his father had become the sergeant major of the battalion--his patience, his skill, his courage.

"He knew his job, sir," said one of them. "He was always onto it."

"It was his care of his men that we thought most of," said Ewen, who continued to relate incidents that had come under his own observation of this characteristic, tears the while flowing down his cheeks.

"He never thought of himself, sir. It was our comfort first. He was far more than our sergeant major. He watched us like a father; that's what he did."

As Barry listened to the soldiers telling of his father in broken words, and with flowing tears, he almost wondered at them for their tears and wondered at himself that he had none. Tears seemed to be so much out of place in telling such a tale as that.

The train for Etaples leaving at an unearthly hour in the morning, Barry went to take farewell of the V. A. D. the night before.

"That is an awfully early hour," she said, "and, oh, such a wretched train." There was in her voice an almost maternal solicitude for his comfort.

"That's nothing," said Barry. "When I see you here at your unending work, it makes me feel more and more like a slacker."

"Wait for me here a moment," she said, and hurried away to return shortly in such a glow of excitement as even her wonted calm and self-restraint could not quite hide.

"I'm going to drive you to Etaples to-morrow in my car. I know the matron and some of the nurses in the American hospital there."

"You don't mean it," said Barry, "but are you sure it's not a terrible bore for you? I am much afraid that I have been a nuisance to you, and you have been so very, very good to me."

"A bore!" she cried, and the brown eyes were wide open in surprise. "A bore, and you a Canadian! Why, you are one of my brothers' friends, and besides you seem to me a friend of our family. My uncle Howard, you know, told me all about you. Besides," she added in a voice of great gentleness, "you remember, I promised."

Barry caught her hand.

"I wish I could tell you all I feel about it, but somehow I can't get the words."

She allowed her hand to remain in his for a moment or two; then withdrawing it, said hurriedly, with a slight colour showing in her cheeks:

"I think I understand." Then changing her tone abruptly, and dropping into the business-like manner of a V. A. D., she said, "So, we'll go to-morrow. It will be a splendid run, if the day is fine. We had better start by nine o'clock to give us a long day." Then, as if forgetting she was a V. A. D., she added with a little catch in her voice, "Oh, I shall love it!"

The day proved to be fine,--one of those golden days of spring that have given to the land its name of "sunny France." It was a day for life and youth and hope. A day on which war seemed more than ever a cruel outrage upon humanity. But across the sunniest days, across the shining face of France, and across their spirits, too, the war cast its black shadow.

They both, however, seemed to have resolved that for that day at least they would turn their eyes from that shadow and let them rest only where the sun was shining.

The V. A. D. with her mind intent upon her wheel could only contribute, as her share in the conversation, descriptive and somewhat desultory comments upon points of interest along the way. Barry, because it harmonised with his mood, talked about his father and all their years together but ever without obtrusion of his grief. The experiences of the past three days, which they had shared, seemed to have established between them a sense of mutual confidence and comradeship such as in ordinary circumstances would have demanded years of companionship to effect. This sense of sympathy and of perfect understanding on the part of the girl at his side, together with the fascinating charm of her beauty, and her sweetness, was to Barry's stricken heart like a healing balm to an aching wound.

They were in sight of Etaples before Barry imagined they could have made more than half the journey.

"Etaples, so soon! It cannot be!"

"But it is," said the girl, throwing a bright smile at him, "and that's the hospital, on the hill yonder, where the flag is flying."

"Why," exclaimed Barry, "that's the American flag! What's the American flag doing there?"

"It's flying over an American hospital," said the V. A. D. "I think it's such a beautiful flag. In the breeze, it seems to me the most beautiful of all the flags. The stripes seem to flow out from the stars. Of course," she added hurriedly, "the Union Jack with all its historic meaning and its mingled crosses, is splendidly glorious and is more decorative, but I always think, when I see those floating stripes, that the Americans have the most beautiful flag."

"I admit," said Barry, "it's a beautiful flag, but--well, I'm a Britisher, I suppose, and see it with British eyes. But why is that flag flying here in France? How do the authorities allow that? It's a neutral flag--awfully neutral, too."

"I understand they have permission from the French authorities to fly that flag over every American institution in France. And you know,"

continued the girl with rising enthusiasm, "if they are neutral, they have immensely helped us, too, haven't they?--in munitions and that sort of thing."

"That's true enough," agreed Barry, "and it's all the more wonderful when you think of the millions of Germans that they have in their country. I heard a very fine thing, not long ago, from a friend of mine. A Pittsburgh oil man about to close a deal, with a traveller, with millions in it, suddenly discovered that his oil was to go to the Germans. At once the deal was off, and, though the price was considerably raised, there was, in his own words, 'Nothing 'doing!' 'No stuff of mine,' he said, 'shall go to help an enemy of the Anglo-Saxon race.' That's the way I believe the real Americans feel."

"This is a wonderful hospital," said the V. A. D. "Whenever I see it, I somehow feel my heart grow warm to the American people for the splendid way in which they have helped poor France, for, you know, in the first months of the war, the French hospitals were perfectly ghastly."

"I know, I know!" cried Barry. "And the Canadians, too, have chipped in a bit. We have a Canadian hospital in Paris, for the French, and others are being organised."

They turned in at the gate and found themselves in a beautiful quadrangle, set out with grass plots and flowers and cement walks. The building itself, an ancient royal palace, had been enlarged by means of sun-parlours and porches which gave it an air of wonderful cheeriness and brightness.

"I will run in and see if any of my friends are about," said the V. A.

D. "Wait here for me. Unless you care to come in," she added.

"No, I will wait here. I don't just feel like meeting strangers but, if there are Canadians in the hospital, I should like to see them.

And perhaps you can discover where my chief can be found, if you don't mind."

Hardly had she passed within the door, when another car came swiftly to the gate and drew up a little in front of Barry's. A girl leaped from the wheel and with a spring in her step, which spoke of a bounding vitality, ran up the steps.

What thought caught her it is difficult to say, but on the topmost step she spun around and looked straight into Barry's eyes.

"Paula!" he shouted, and was out of the car and at the foot of the steps, with hand outstretched, when, with a single touch of her foot to the steps, she was at him, with both hands reaching for his.

"Barry, oh, Barry! It can't be you!" she panted. Her face went red, then white, then red again. "Oh, it's better than a drink to see you. Whence, how, why, whither? Oh, never mind answering," she went on. "It's enough to see you."

A step behind her diverted her attention from Barry. Barry ran up the steps, and taking the V. A. D. by the hand, led her down.

"I want you to meet a friend of mine," he said and introduced Paula.