"I know, Mother. I know. But you wouldn't ask him back even if that were possible. You wouldn't, if you could, take 'the purple of his blood out of the cross on the breastplate of England.' Don't you love these words of Ruskin? It's the proudest thing we have to think about, and, honestly--I'm not just saying this--I believe that the men who lie out there have the best of it. The men who came back will, most of them, have to fight a grim struggle, for living is none too pleasant just now, and they will grow old, and bald, and ill-tempered, and they have all to die in the end. What is twenty more years of life but twenty more years of fearing death? But our men whose sacrifice was accepted, and who were allowed to pour out the sweet, red wine of youth, passed at one bound from glorious life to glorious life. 'Eld shall not make a mock of that dear head.' They know not age or weariness or defeat." CHAPTER XXIV The December day had run its short and stormy course and the sun was going down in anger, with streaks of crimson and orange, and great purple clouds. Only over the top of the far hills was one long line of placid pale primrose, like some calm landlocked bay amid seas of tumbling waters. Mrs. Douglas, crossing the room to get a paper from the table, paused at the wide window and looked out. Desolate the landscape looked, the stretch of moorland, and the sodden fields, and the empty highroad running like a ribbon between hills now dark with rain. She sighed as she looked. Ann was writing at the bureau, had been writing since luncheon, absorbed, never lifting her head, but now she blotted vigorously the last sheet, put the pen back in the tray, shut the lid of the ink-bottle, and announced: "Now, then, Mother, that's your _Life_ written!" Mrs. Douglas looked at the finished pile of manuscript and sighed again. Ann got up and went over to the window. "You are sighing like a furnace, Mother. What's the matter? Does it depress you to think that I've finished my labours? Oh, look at the sunset! It bodes ill for the Moncrieffs ever getting over the door, poor lambs! Look at that quiet, shining bit over the Farawa, how far removed it looks from tempests! D'you know what that sky reminds me of, Mother? The story of your life that I've just finished. The clouds and the angry red colour are all you passed through, and that quiet, serene streak is where you are now, the clear shining after rain. It may be dull, but you must admit it is peaceful." "Oh, we are peaceful enough just now, but think of Jim in South Africa, and Charlotte and Mark in India--who knows what news we may have of them any day? I just live in dread of what may happen next."