"If Alf wants a thing he usually gets it." Ernie flashed white. "Ah," he said. "We'll see what dad says." It was a new move in the family game, and unexpected. Anne was completely taken a-back. She felt that Ernie was not playing fair. There had always been an unwritten family law, inscribed by the mother on the minds of the two boys in suggestible infancy, that dad should be left outside all broils and controversies; that dad should be spared unpleasantness, and protected at any cost. She was shocked, almost to pleading. "You'd never tell him!" "He's the very one I would tell then!" retorted Ernie, rejoicing in his newly-discovered vein of brutality. "Only worry him," she coaxed. "He ain't the only one," Ern answered. "I'm fairly up against it, too." Grinning quietly at his victory, he turned down the passage to the study. His father was sitting in his favourite spot under the picture of his ancestor, watching the tree-tops blowing in the Rectory garden opposite. The familiar brown-paper-clad New Testament was on his knee. Ernie marked at once that here was the one tranquil spirit he had met since the declaration of war. And this was not the calm of stagnation. Rather it was the intense quiet of the wheel which revolves so swiftly that it appears to be still. He drew his chair beside his father's. "What d'you make of it all, dad?" he asked gently. The old man took his thumb out of his New Testament, and laid his hand upon his son's. "_And behold there was a great earthquake,_" he quoted. "_For the Angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door of the Tomb._" Ernie nodded thoughtfully. For the first time perhaps the awful solemnity of the drama in which he was about to play his part came home to him in all its overwhelming power. "Yes, dad," he said deeply. "Only I reck'n it took some rolling." The old man gripped and kneaded the hand in his just as Ruth would do in moments of stress. "True, Boy-lad," he answered. "But it had to be rolled away before the Lord could rise." Ernie assented. Hand-in-hand they sat together for some while. Then Ernie rose to go. In the silence and dusk father and son stood together on the very spot where fourteen years before they had said good-bye on Ernie's departure for the Army. The Edward Caspar of those days was old now; and the boy of that date a matured man, scarred already by the wars of Time. "It won't be easy rolling back the stone, Boy-lad," said the old man. "But they that are for us are more than they that are against us." It was not often that Ernie misunderstood his father; but he did now. "Yes," he said. "And they say the Italians are coming in too."