So we leaned against the railings in the warm twilight haze while the battalion, silently as a shadow, formed up behind us ready to be taken over. The heat, the hum of the great city, as it might have been the hum of a camped army, the creaking of the belts, and the well-known faces bent above them, brought back to me the memory of another evening, years ago, when Verschoyle and I waited for news of guns missing in no sham fight. “A regular Sanna’s Post, isn’t it?” I said at last. “D’you remember, Vee—by the market-square—that night when the wagons went out?” Then it came upon me, with no horror, but a certain mild wonder, that we had waited, Vee and I, that night for the body of Boy Bayley; and that Vee himself had died of typhoid in the spring of 1902. The rustling of the papers continued, but Bayley, shifting slightly, revealed to me the three-day old wound on his left side that had soaked the ground about him. I saw Pigeon fling up a helpless arm as to guard himself against a spatter of shrapnel, and Luttrell with a foolish tight-lipped smile lurched over all in one jointless piece. Only old Vee’s honest face held steady for awhile against the darkness that had swallowed up the battalion behind us. Then his jaw dropped and the face stiffened, so that a fly made bold to explore the puffed and scornful nostril. I waked brushing a fly from my nose, and saw the Club waiter set out the evening papers on the table. “THEY” THE RETURN OF THE CHILDREN Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs’ dove-winged races— Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome; Plucking the radiant robes of the passers by, and with pitiful faces Begging what Princes and Powers refused:—“Ah, please will you let us go home?” Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary the Mother, Kneeled and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along to the gateway— Yea, the all-iron unbribable Door which Peter must guard and none other. Straightway She took the Keys from his keeping, and opened and freed them straightway. Then to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled, She said: “On the night that I bore Thee What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven that was not my arm? Didst Thou push from the nipple, O Child, to hear the angels adore Thee? When we two lay in the breath of the kine?” And He said:—“Thou hast done no harm.” So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand, Looking neither to left nor right where the breathless Heavens stood still; And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for they heard the Command. “Shall I that have suffered the children to come to me hold them against their will?” “THEY”