The clothes and the boots and the butcher’s bills!  It’s pleasant to think of now, just as it’s pleasant to look from the hilltop at the steep road you’ve come.  The boys sometimes tell me that they are glad we were too poor to have a nurse, for it meant that they were brought up with their father and me.  We had our meals together, and their father helped them with their lessons.  Indeed, it’s only now I realise how happy I was to have them all under one roof.”

She stopped and sighed, and went on again with a laugh.  “I remember one time a week before the Sustentation Fund was due, I was down to one six-pence And of course a collector arrived!  D’you remember that, John?...  And the boys worked so hard to educate themselves.  All except Duncan.  Oh, but I am glad that my little laddie had an easy time—­when it was to be such a short one.”

“He always wanted to be a soldier,” Mr. Macdonald said.  “You remember, Anne, when you tried to get him to say he would be a minister?  He was about six then, I think.  He said, ‘No, it’s not a white man’s job,’ and then looked at me apologetically afraid that he had hurt my feelings.  When the War came he went ‘most jocund, apt, and willingly,’ but without any ill-will in his heart to the Germans.

  “’He left no will but good will
    And that to all mankind....’”

Mrs. Macdonald stared into the fire with tear-blurred eyes and said:  “I sometimes wonder if they died in vain.  If this is the new world it’s a far worse one than the old.  Class hatred, discontent, wild extravagance in some places, children starving in others, women mad for pleasure, and the dead forgotten already except by the mothers—­the mothers who never to their dying day will see a fresh-faced boy without a sword piercing their hearts and a cry rising to their lips, ‘My son!  My son!’”

“It’s all true, Anne,” said her husband, “but the sacrifice of love and innocence can never be in vain.  Nothing 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,