“Killed at Bullecourt,” Ruth answered. “I could not help feeling it was perhaps best. He will be a hero to her now always.” The lower field was steeped in the afternoon sunshine, and the children were chirping like so many birds. Two sat by the stream blowing dandelion clocks, which another small child carried to them with careful footsteps, his tongue protruding in the anxious effort to convey the fragile globes in safety before they floated away. Two bigger boys were planting busily in a clearing in the wood. Another slept, seemingly just as he had fallen, with all the lissom grace of childhood, and on the bank beside him a small girl crooned to something she nursed against her flat little chest. Roger North looked at the peaceful scene with relief. “I believe I’d expect a sort of school feast,” he said. “If you don’t break forth any more violently than this, I’m with you. What are the little beggars planting?” “Michaelmas daisies. They should do there, don’t you think? And we are trying lilies in that far corner. The soil is damp and peaty. We were too late for fruit trees this year but I’ve great plans for autumn planting.” North, oddly enough, so it seemed to many, was popular with children. He never asked them endless questions, or if they wanted to do this or that. He liked the little people, and had discovered that at heart they were like the shy wild things. Leave them alone and keep quiet, and, ten to one, presently a little hand will creep into yours. He let himself down on the bank near the crooning child, in silence. She was a thin white slip of a thing, with very fair hair and a pair of big translucent eyes. It was an old doll she was nursing, so old that its face had practically disappeared, and a blank white circle gazed to heaven from under a quite smart tam-o’-shanter. She was telling some story apparently, but only now and then were any words intelligible. Presently she began to look at North sideways, and her voice rose out of its low monotone into a higher key. It was like the sudden movement of a bird nearer to something or some one whose _bona fides_ it has at first mistrusted.