“I don’t think you will find the War-side will raise any objection,” said he. “By the way, they don’t wear that uniform over there.” Almost before Death ceased speaking, it was ripped off and flung on the floor, and that which had been a sober clerk of Normal Civil Death stood up an unmistakable, curly-haired, bat-winged, faun-eared Imp of the Pit. But where his wings joined his shoulders there was a patch of delicate dove-coloured feathering that gave promise to spread all up the pinion. St. Peter saw it and smiled, for it was a known sign of grace. “Thank Goodness!” the ex-clerk gasped as he snatched up the Lattimer records and sheered sideways through the skylight. “Amen!” said Death and St. Peter together, and walked through the door. “Weren’t you hinting something to me a little while ago about _my_ lax methods?” St. Peter demanded, innocently. “Well, if one doesn’t help one’s Staff, one’s Staff will never help itself,” Death retorted. “Now, I shall have to pitch in a stiff demi-official asking how that young fiend came to be taken on in the N.C.D. without examination. And I must do it before the N.C.D. complain that I’ve been interfering with their departmental transfers. _Aren’t_ they human? If you want to go back to The Gate I think our shortest way will be through here and across the War-Sheds.” They came out of a side-door into Heaven’s full light. A phalanx of Shining Ones swung across a great square singing: “To Him Who made the Heavens abide, yet cease not from their motion, To Him Who drives the cleansing tide twice a day round ocean-- Let His Name be magnified in all poor folk’s devotion!” Death halted their leader, and asked a question. “We’re Volunteer Aid Serving Powers,” the Seraph explained, “reporting for duty in the Domestic Induced Casualty Department--told off to help relatives, where we can.” The shift trooped on--such an array of Powers, Honours, Glories, Toils, Patiences, Services, Faiths and Loves as no man may conceive even by favour of dreams. Death and St. Peter followed them into a D.I.C.D. Shed on the English side, where, for the moment, work had slackened. Suddenly a name flashed on the telephone-indicator. “Mrs. Arthur Bedott, 317, Portsmouth Avenue, Brondesbury. Husband badly wounded. One child.” Her special weakness was appended. A Seraph on the raised dais that overlooked the Volunteer Aids waiting at the entrance, nodded and crooked a finger. One of the new shift--a temporary Acting Glory--hurled himself from his place and vanished earthward. “You may take it,” Death whispered to St. Peter, “there will be a sustaining epic built up round Private Bedott’s wound for his wife and Baby Bedott to cling to. And here--” they heard wings that flapped wearily--“here, I suspect, comes one of our failures.”