There was a humble church in a quiet street where a service flag hung, thick with dark stars, and the congregation were passing out from a special service for its boys who were going off to camp.  The boys were there on the steps, surrounded by people eager to touch their hands, a little group of eight or ten with serious bright faces, and a look in their eyes which stabbed into Barlow.  One may see that look any day in any town, meeting the erect stalwart lads in khaki who are about our streets.  It is the look of those who have made a vital sacrifice and know the price, and whose minds are at peace.  Barlow, lingering on the corner across the way, stared hungrily.  How had they got that look, that peace?  If only he might talk to one of them!  Yet he knew how dumb an animal is a boy, and how helpless these would be to give him the master word.

The master-word, he needed that; he needed it desperately.  He must go; he must.  Life would be unendurable without self-respect; no amount of explaining could cover the stain on his soul if he failed in the answer to the call of honor.  That was it, it was in a nut-shell, the call.  Yet he could not hear it as his call.  He wandered unhappily away and left the church and its dissolving congregation, and the boys, the pride of the church, the boys who were now, they also, separating and going back each to his home for the last evening perhaps, to be loved and made much of.  Barlow vaguely pictured the scenes in those little homes—­eyes bright with unshed tears, love and laughter and courage, patriotism as fine as in any great house in America, determination that in giving to America what was dearest it should be given with high spirit—­that the boys should have smiling faces to remember, over there.  And then again—­love and tender words.  He was missing all that.  He, too, might go back to his father’s house an enlisted man, and meet his father’s eyes of pride and see his sisters gaze at him with a new respect, feel their new honor of him in the touch of arms about his neck.  All these things were for him too, if he would but take them.  With that there was the sound of singing, shrill, fresh voices singing down the street.  He wheeled about.  A company of little girls were marching towards him and he smiled, looking at them, thinking the sight as pretty as a garden of flowers.  They were from eight to ten or eleven years old and in the bravery of fresh white dresses; each had a big butterfly of pink or blue or yellow or white ribbon perched on each little fair or dark head, and each carried over her shoulder a flag.  Quite evidently they were coming from the celebration at the church, where in some capacity they had figured.  Not millionaires children these; the little sisters likely of the boys who were going to be soldiers; just dear things that bloom all over America, the flowering of the land, common to rich and poor.  As they sprang along two by two, in unmartial ranks, they sang with all their might “The Long, Long Trail.”