"It is a desperately lonely home, that Yengst home, with the little girl gone away on a long journey; but how tight and close other fathers and mothers hugged their little ones last night when their hearts came back from the house of sorrow. And the little ones, feeling no fear, unconscious of the pang of terror that was shooting through the souls about them--the children played on, and maybe, before dropping to sleep, wondered a little at anxious looks they saw in grown-up eyes. "This is the faith of a little child, curious but implicit, in the goodness of those things outside one's self. And 'of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.'" A day or so after the wedding someone said to him: "Mehronay, sometimes your pieces make me cry," and he replied with all the fine sincerity of his heart showing in his eyes: "Yes--and if you only knew how they make me cry! Sometimes when I have written one like--like that--I go to my bed and sob like a child." He turned and walked away, but he came into the office whistling "The Dutch Company." After his wedding we made brave, in a sly way, to rail at Mehronay about his love affair, and he took it good-naturedly. He knew the situation just as it was; his sense of humour allowed him no false view of the matter. One afternoon when the paper was out, George Kirwin, the foreman, and one of the reporters and Mehronay were in the back room leaning against the imposing-stones looking over the paper, when Kirwin said: "Say, Mehronay, how did you get yourself screwed up to ask her?" It was spoken in a joke. The two young men were grinning, but Mehronay looked at the floor in a study as he said: "Well, to be honest--damfino if I ever did--just exactly." He smiled reflectively in a pause and continued: "Nearest I remember was one night we was sitting with our feet on the base-burner and I looked up and says, 'Hell's afire, Commie'--I called her that for short--'why in the devil don't a fine woman like you get married? She got up and come over to where I was a-sitting and before I could say Lordamighty, she put her hand on my shoulder and says real soft and solemn: 'I'll just be damned if I don't believe I will.'" He did not smile when he looked up, but sighed contentedly as he added reverently: "And so, by hell, she did!" If Columbia Merley Mehronay had known this language which her husband's innocent inadvertence put into her mouth she would have strangled him--even then.