The other scene that stands out took place half a year earlier, when he was five and a half. He had been down on a visit to some relatives in the country and was talking about a particular pond which he had seen. Then his father began to tell him the story of how the famous American preacher Theodore Parker, when he was a little boy, was standing one day by a pond, looking at a beautiful flower that grew at its edge, when a frog suddenly came up out of the water. Young Parker took up a stone to kill the frog, but stopped because a voice within him, which was the voice of his conscience, told him that it would be wrong to take the harmless creature's life. "Yes, fa'ver," Little Yeogh Wough nodded wisely. "I know about that voice. I've heard it, too. I'm hearing it now." "You're hearing it now, Roland? What do you mean?" "Why, down at Uncle Jack's there were some nice round things, all white and red and smooth, and I wanted them and I asked Auntie May if I could have them and she said: 'No, Yoland, you can't have them, because they're ivowy card counters.' And I didn't like her telling me I couldn't have them, so I took them when she was gone out, and I've bwought them up here to London wiv' me. Nurse doesn't know. I've got them now. But I don't feel as if I want them now." "No, of course not. That was very wrong of you. You must go and get them at once and give them up to your mother or to me and we will send them back to Auntie May and tell her that you are very sorry." "Yes, I've been sorry ever since I bwought them up." A little blue silk suit flashed my thoughts back to a garden party which the weather turned into an indoor party, and at which Little Yeogh Wough made himself a small Master of the Ceremonies, taking away from his smaller sister an ice which she had secretly captured and conducting her upstairs on the pretext that at three and a half years old she was too young to take part in social affairs. How the gay, brave little feet went about that day, with the joy of the May-time in the house, in spite of the rain, and outside all the glamour and the glory of a London that as yet knew not the Great War! There is an American song in which a mother declares that she never raised her son to be a soldier. I never raised my son to be a soldier. I thought he had too much brain power for the Army, especially if there was to be no war. And yet I was making him a soldier every day, and, above all, every night. For every night of his life, from the time he was two years old, I had gone to see him in bed, as he phrased it. Now and again there was a break in these nightly visits, when I had to go out to dinner, and especially to an unusually early dinner; but, except for these rare breaks, I never failed the child in these good-night talks.