“Well, I have.  May I turn them over to you, Derry?”

“For a minute.  But you must come back.”

She came back presently, to find the lights out and only the glow of the fire to illumine faintly the three figures on the sofa.  She stood unseen in the door and listened.

“And so the Tin Soldier stood on the shelf where the little boy had put him, and nothing happened in the old, old house.  There was just an old, old man, and walls covered with old, old portraits, and knights in armor, and wooden trumpeters carved on the door who blew with all their might, ’Trutter-a-trutt, Trutter-a-trutt’—.  But the old man and the portraits and the wooden trumpeters had no thought for the Tin Soldier who stood there on the shelf, alone and longing to go to the war.  And at last the Tin Soldier cried out, ’I can’t stand it.  I want to go to the wars—­I want to go to the wars!’ But nobody listened or cared.”

“Poor ’itte sing,” Margaret-Mary crooned.

“If I had been there,” Teddy proclaimed, “I’d have put him on the floor and told him to run and run and run!”

“But there was nobody to put him on the floor,” said Derry, “so at last the Tin Soldier could stand it no longer.  ’I will go to the wars, I will go to the wars,’ he cried, and he threw himself down from the shelf.”

The story stopped suddenly.  “Go on, go on,” urged the little voices in the dark.

“Perhaps you think that was the end of it, and that the Tin Soldier ran away to the wars, to help his country and save the world from ruin.  But Fate wasn’t as kind to him as that.  For when the little boy came again to the old house, he looked for the Tin Soldier.  But he wasn’t on the shelf.  And he looked and looked and, the old man looked, and the wooden trumpeters blew out their cheeks, ’Trutter-a-trutt, trutter-a-trutt—­where is the Tin Soldier?—­trutter-a-trutt—.’

“But they did not find him, for the Tin Soldier had fallen through a crack in the floor, and there he lay as in an open grave.”

Drusilla’s voice was heard in the lower hall, and the deeper voice of Captain Hewes.  Margaret sped down to meet them, leaving the story, reluctantly, in that moment of heart-breaking climax.

When later Derry followed her, she had a chance to say, “I hope you gave it a happy ending.”

“Oh, did you hear?  Yes.  They found him in time to send him away to war.  But Hans Andersen didn’t end it that way.  He knew life.”

She stared at him in amazement.  Was this the Derry whose supply of cheerfulness had seemed inexhaustible?  Whose persistent optimism had been at times exasperating to his friends?

Throughout the evening she was aware of his depression.  She was aware, too, of the mistake which she had made in bringing Derry and Captain Hewes together.

The Captain had red hair and a big nose.  But he was a gentleman in the fine old English sense; he was a soldier with but one idea, that every physically able man should fight.  Every sentence that he spoke was charged with this belief, and every sentence carried a sting for Derry.