The beautiful transept was dark at first, after the sunlight outside. Then it lifted straight and high from the cool dusk into the quiet light of the stained windows. Except for the faint echo of their footsteps along the marble floor, the two moved from tablet to tablet in silence. Somewhere near the south door they stopped, and Philip said simply,-- “This one is Shaw’s.” When they passed on and out, and sat in the shade on the steps, Haydock’s mother wiped her eyes. The long, silent roll-call always made her do that. “It was a great, great price to pay,” she said at last. “I never knew how great,” said Philip, “until I came here one day and tried to live it all over, as if it were happening now. Before then the war seemed fine, and historic, and all that, but ever so far away. It’s been real since then. I thought of how all the little groups of fellows would talk about it in the Yard between lectures, and read the morning papers while the lectures were going on; and how the instructors would hate to have to tell them not to. And I thought what it would be like to have the men I know--Alfred and Peter Bradley, and Sears Wolcott and Douglas and Billy and Pat, and all of them, getting restless and excited, and sitting up all night at the club, and then throwing down their books and marching away to the front to be shot; and how I would have to go along too, because--well, you couldn’t stay at home while they were being shot every day, and thrown into trenches. I don’t think you ever realise it very much until you think about it that way.” “It seems, now, so terrible that they had to go,” Philip’s mother broke in earnestly; “such a cruel stamping out of youth and strength and happiness at the very beginning.” “But it isn’t as if you felt it were all a hideous waste. It did something great; it’s doing something now. It can never stop,” Philip added, gently; “for every year the new ones come,--the ones who don’t know yet. It’s the fellows who die here at college who always seem to me so thrown away, so wasted,” he went on. “They don’t seem to get their show, somehow,--like Wellington, for instance.” “Did I meet Wellington?” asked Mrs. Haydock, trying to attach a personality to the name. She usually remembered Philip’s friends. “Heavens, no!” answered Philip. “Nobody knew Wellington, except a few of us,--after he got pneumonia and died, which he did last February. He was in our class, and he must have been a nice fellow; his mother was very nice. But I’d never heard of him. It had just happened that way,--the way it does here.” “Where did you know his mother?” asked Mrs. Haydock. “Why, I thought I’d written you all that. It must have been too long, or too dreary, or something,” said Philip. “No, you never told me.”