At the elevator grating
they waited a moment; the cold draft up the shaft fanned the hair back from
Elsie's forehead as she stood looking down, watching the ascent of the
cage.
"It would be a happy thing," said the bishop, "if parents could always go
with their children on these long roads of experience; but there are some
roads the boys and the girls will have to take alone. We shall all meet at
the other end, though--we shall all meet at the end."
Elsie walked up and down the hall awhile, dreading to go back to the room.
A band in the street below was playing an old war-song of the sixties,
revived this battle summer of '98,--a song that was sung when the cost of
that war was beginning to tell, "We shall meet, but we shall miss him."
Elsie knew the music; she had not yet learned the words.
Next morning Mr. Valentin received one of his wife's vague but thrifty
telegrams, dated at Chicago, on Sunday night, July 3:
"We cannot go through with it. Expect us home Wednesday."
Mrs. Valentin had spent hours, years, in explaining to Elsie's father
the many cogent and crying reasons for taking her East to be finished. It
needed not quite five minutes to explain why she had brought her back.
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