There were soldiers--rows and rows of gleaming soldiers. They came from a misty distance at the top of the shop window, came marching from the gates of some dark, mediæval castle. Their swords caught the lamplight, shining in a line of silver and the precision with which they marched, the certainty with which they trod the little bridge ... ah, these were the fellows! He would be a Boy ... soldiers would enchant him! He should have boxes, boxes, boxes! There were many other things in the window; teddy bears and animals with soft woolly stomachs and fat comfortable legs--and there were ugly, modern Horrors with fat bulging faces and black hair erect like wire; there were little devils with red tails, there were rabbits that rode bicycles and monkeys that climbed trees. There were drums--big drums and little drums--trumpets with crimson tassels, and in one corner a pyramid of balls, balls of every colour, and at the top of the pyramid a tiny ball of peacock blue, hanging, balancing, daintily, supremely right in pose and gesture. It had gesture. It caught Peter's eye--Peter stood with his nose against the pane, his heart hammering--“Oh! she is suffering--My God, how she is suffering!”--and there the little blue ball caught him, held him, encouraged him. “I will belong to your boy one day” it seemed to say. “It shall be the first thing I will buy for him--” thought Peter. He turned now amongst the light and crowds of Piccadilly. He walked on without seeing and hearing--always with that thought in his heart--“She is in terrible pain. How can God be so cruel? And she was so happy--before I came she was so happy--now--what have I done to her?” Never, before to-night, had he felt so sharply, so irretrievably his sense of responsibility. Here now, before him, at this birth of his child, everything that he had done, thought, said--everything that he had been--confronted him. He was only twenty-seven but his shoulders were heavy with the confusion of his past. Looking back upon it, he saw a helpless medley of indecisions, of sudden impulses, sudden refusals; into the skeins of it, too, there seemed to be dragged the people that had made up his life--they faced him, surrounded him, bewildered him! What right had he, thus encompassed, to hand these things on to another? His father, his grandfather ... he saw always that dark strain of hatred, of madness, of evil working in their blood. Suppose that as his boy grew he should see this in the young eyes? Suppose, most horrible of all, that he should feel this hatred for his son that his grandfather had felt for his father, that his father had felt for him. What had he done?... He stopped, staring confusedly about him. The people jostled him on every side. The old devils were at him--“Eat and drink for to-morrow we die.... Give it up ... We're too strong for you and we'll be too strong for your son. Who are you to defy us? Come down--give it up--”