hing can ever dim that sacrifice. The
country's dead will save the country as they saved it before. Those
young lives have gone in front to light the way for us."

Mrs. Macdonald took up her sock again with a long sigh.

"I wish I could comfort myself with thoughts as you can, John, but I
never had any mind. No, Jean, you needn't protest so politely. I'm a
good house-wife and I admit my shortbread is 'extra,' as Duncan used to
say. Duncan was very sorry as a small boy that he had left heaven and
come to stay with us. He used to say with a sigh, 'You see, heaven's
extra.' I don't know where he picked up the expression. But what I was
going to say is that people are so wretchedly provoking. This morning I
was really badly provoked. For one thing, I was very busy doing the
accounts of the Girls' Club (you know I have no head for figures), and
Mrs. Morton strolled in to see me, to cheer me up, she said. Cheer me
up! She maddened me. I haven't been forty years a minister's wife
without learning patience, but it would have done me all the good in the
world to take that woman by her expensive fur coat and walk her rapidly
out of the room. She sat there breathing opulence, and told me how hard
it was for her to live--she, a lone woman with six servants to wait on
her and a car and a chauffeur! 'I am not going to give to this War
Memorial,' she said. 'At this time it seems rather a wasteful
proceeding, and it won't do the men who have fallen any good.' ... I
could have told her that surely it wasn't _waste_ the men were thinking
about when they poured out their youth like wine that she and her like
might live and hug their bank books."

Mr. Macdonald had moved from his chair in the window, and now stood with
one hand on the mantelshelf looking into the fire. "Do you remember," he
said, "that evening in Bethany when Mary took a box of spikenard, very
costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, so that the odour of the
ointment filled the house? Judas--that same Judas who carried the bag
and was a robber--was much concerned about the waste. He said that the
box might have been sold for three hundred pence and given to the poor.
And Jesus, rebuking him, said, 'The poor always ye have with you, but Me
ye have not always.'"

He stopped abruptly and went over to his writing-table and made as
though he were arranging papers. Presently he said, "Anne, you've been
here." His tone was accusing.

"Only writing a post card," said his wife