Bobby looked at me in surprise.  “You’re a great claque for me,” he said.  “You seem to take an interest in my hero.  Yes, he got it.  He was badly hurt.  One hand nearly gone and a wound in his side.  I was lucky enough to be in London on a day three months later, and to be present at the ceremony, when the young French-Canadian, spoiled for a soldier, but splendid stuff now for a hero, stood out in the open before the troops in front of Buckingham Palace and King George pinned the V.C. on his breast.  They say that he’s back in his village, and the whole show.  I hear that he tells over and over the story of his heroism and the rescue of ‘Mon Lieutenant.’ to never failing audiences.  Of course, John is looking after him, for the hand which John saved was the hand that was shot to pieces in saving John, and the Tin Lizzie can never make his living with that hand again.  A deserter, a coward—­decorated by the King with the Victoria Cross!  Queer things happen in war!” There was a stir, a murmur as of voices, of questions beginning, but Bobby was not quite through.

“War takes the best of the best men, and the best of the cheapest, and transfigures both.  War doesn’t need heroes for heroism.  She pins it on anywhere if there’s one spot of greatness in a character.  War does strange things with humanity,” said Bobby.

And I, gasping, broke out crudely in three words:  “Our Tin Lizzie!” I said, and nobody knew in the least what I meant, or with what memories I said it.

HE THAT LOSETH HIS LIFE SHALL FIND IT

The Red Cross women had gone home.  Half an hour before, the large library had been filled with white-clad, white-veiled figures.  Two long tables full, forty of them today, had been working; three thousand surgical dressings had been cut and folded and put away in large boxes on shelves behind glass doors where the most valuable books had held their stately existence for years.  The books were stowed now in trunks in the attic.  These were war days; luxuries such as first editions must wait their time.  The great living-room itself, the center of home for this family since the two boys were born and ever this family had been, the dear big room with its dark carved oak, and tapestries, and stained glass, and books, and memories was given over now to war relief work.

Sometimes, as the mistress walked into the spacious, low-ceilinged, bright place, presences long past seemed to fill it intolerably.  Brock and Hugh, little chaps, roared in untidy and tumultuous from football, or came, decorous and groomed, handsome, smart little lads, to be presented to guests.  Her own Hugh, her husband, proud of the beautiful new house, smiled from the hearth to her as he had smiled twenty-six years back, the night they came in, a young Hugh, younger than Brock was now.  Her father and mother, long gone over “to the majority,” and the exquisite old ivory beauty of a beautiful grandmother—­such