Margot noticed the change. I suppose I stopped the struggle with her. "What’s the matter?" she asked. "Nothing." But I went off and sat down apart. "What’s the matter?" she insisted, coming over and standing in front of me. "Did I hurt you?" "No," I said. "But we mustn’t wrestle like that. We aren’t children any more." She threw up her head and began to make fun of me and my new long trousers. But I interrupted her. "Margot! Margot! Don’t you understand?" I took hold of her hands and pulled her down beside me and kissed her. It was the first time. I am sure she did not understand what I meant—I was not clear about it myself. But she fell suddenly silent. And while I sat there with my arm about her, I saw a vision of Mary’s home and the warm joy of it. Margot and I would have a home like that; not like the Father’s. I was under the spell of some dizzying emotion which none of our grown up words will fit. The emotion, I suppose, comes but once, and is too fleeting to have won a place in adult dictionaries. It was painful and awesome, but as I walked home I was very happy. *V* Of course I never questioned the Father’s religious dogmas. I did not even know that they might be questioned. But two things troubled me persistently. I had been taught that our Saviour was the Prince of Peace, that His chief commandment was the law of love. But when adults got together there was always talk of the war. I do not think there was any elder or deacon in our church who had not served. How often I listened to stories of the wave of murder and rapine that had swept through our mountains only a few years before! I remember especially the placing of a battle monument just outside our village and the horde of strangers who came from various parts of the state for the ceremony. The heroes were five men in gray uniforms, all who were left of the company which had stood there and had been shot to pieces. One was an old man, three were middle aged, and one was so young that he could not have been more than sixteen on the day of the fight. The man who had been their captain stayed at the parsonage. After supper the principal men of the village gathered in our parlor. I stood by the Father’s chair and listened wide-eyed as, in his cracked voice, the Captain told us all the details of that slaughter. I remember that in the excitement of his story-telling the old soldier became profane, and the Father did not rebuke him. Somehow I could not feel any romance in modern warfare, there seemed no similarity between these men and the chivalric heroes of The Round Table. Perhaps if Launcelot had been a real person, there in the parsonage parlor, and had told me face to face and vividly how he had slain the false knight Gawaine, had made me see the smear of blood on his sword blade, the cloven headed corpse of his enemy, that also they might have seemed abhorrent.