f some time they will flap their wings
and fly away--on a night like this--the swans going first, and then the
ducks and geese, and last of all the little birds, trailing across the
moon----" Her hands fluttered to show them trailing. Becky used her
hands a great deal when she talked. Aunt Claudia deplored it as
indicating too little repose. The nuns, she felt, should have corrected
the habit. But the nuns had loved Becky's descriptive hands, poking,
emphasizing, and had let her alone.

The three of them, the Judge and Becky and Dalton, went out together.
The little group which sat in the wide moonlighted space in front of the
house was dwarfed by the great trees which hung in masses of black
against the brilliant night. The white dresses of the women seemed
touched with silver.

The lemonade was delicious, and Aunt Claudia forced herself to be
gracious. Caroline Paine was gracious without an effort. She liked
Dalton. Not in the same way, perhaps, that she liked Major Prime, but
he was undoubtedly handsome, and of a world which wore lovely clothes
and did not have to count its pennies.

Major Prime had little to say. He was content to sit there in the
fragrant night and listen to the rest. A year ago he had been jolted
over rough roads in an ambulance. There had been a moon and men
groaning. There had seemed to him something sinister about that white
night with its spectral shadows, and with the trenches of the enemy
wriggling like great serpents underground. The trail of the serpent was
still over the world. He had been caught but not killed. There was still
poison in his fangs!

He spoke sharply, therefore, when Dalton said, "It was a great adventure
for a lot of fellows who went over----"

"Don't," said the Major, and sat up. "Does it matter what took them?
_The thing that matters is how they came back_----"

"What do you mean?"

"A thousand reasons took them over. Some of them went because they had
to, some of them because they wanted to. Some of them dramatized
themselves as heroes and hoped for an opportunity to demonstrate their
courage. Some of them were scared stiff, but went because of their
consciences, some of them wanted to fight and some of them didn't, but
whatever the reason, _they went_. And now they are back, and it is much
more important to know what they think now about war than what they
thought about it when they were enlisted or drafted. If their baptism of
fire has made them hate cruelty