"Keep the home fires burning, While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away, they dream of home, There's a silver lining Through the dark cloud shining, Turn your dark clouds inside out Till the boys come home." They passed in a roar of voices that drowned the band. So the long, long columns of the London Divisions tramped through the heart of the Mother-City, under the fluttering of countless flags, under the surge and resurge of joy-bells from every steeple, under great banners that proclaimed the gratitude of the city. Rank after rank they lifted their eyes to the laurel-green inscription that spanned the street at Temple Bar: "SHALL WE FORGET?--NEVER!" Rank by rank they passed under the promise--the thousands of men welded in the fires of war to a wondrous miracle of collective soul--passed onward for the last time as one living unit, ere they should lay down their arms, _fall out_--and disperse, individuals that were fragments of a sacred memory, the shreds of a battle-flag distributed. * * * * * Sir Thomas Jackson Hathaway, Kt., Alderman of the City of London, looked along the masculine faces, spaced with the interstices of the departed ladies, of the little dinner-party of intimate friends, and then again to the brown keen visage of his son. He pushed along the decanter--he was old-fashioned and made a virtue of it--"Fill up, Harry, my boy--I've been looking after the cellar while you've been away--there's more of it." He laughed a little at the mirth of his implied suggestion that there might possibly be a shortage in the cellars of Sir Thomas Hathaway. And his guests laughed a little in courtesy. "We've kept the flag flying here also, my boy," said the big, heavily jovial host, puffing hugely at his cigar and then taking it from his mouth to examine it with a superfluously critical eye. "You'll find things as well--better, than when you left. You don't mind, gentlemen, this little talk of shop? After all, we're all friends together, and most of us have some small interest in the little business, ha! ha!" The guests were, in fact, Sir Thomas Hathaway's co-directors in the large enterprises he controlled. He continued: "Better I may say, for we have been very conservative--we've looked to the younger generation away fighting our battles for us--and we've built up a reserve fund that a few years ago we shouldn't have dreamed of. You've come back to a first-class concern, Harry, my boy. Here's to it!" He raised and drained his glass, setting a followed example to his guests. Captain Hathaway had been toying with a match on the tablecloth. He looked up--quiet and thoughtful, his face clean-cut and aristocratic by contrast with the heavy opulence of his sire. "You don't anticipate Labour trouble, then, father?" Sir Thomas Hathaway laughed, a guffaw, and crashed his hand on the table.