All life that is wild and young
     In mountain and wave and stream
     All that of earth is sprung,
     Or breathes in the red sunbeam;
     Yea, and Mankind.  O’er all a royal throne,
     Cyprian, Cyprian, is thine alone!”

The Greek was right!  Megan!  Poor little Megan—­coming over the hill!  Megan under the old apple tree waiting and looking!  Megan dead, with beauty printed on her!

A voice said: 

“Oh, there you are!  Look!”

Ashurst rose, took his wife’s sketch, and stared at it in silence.

“Is the foreground right, Frank?”

“Yes.”

“But there’s something wanting, isn’t there?”

Ashurst nodded.  Wanting?  The apple tree, the singing, and the gold!

And solemnly he put his lips to her forehead.  It was his silver-wedding day. 1916

THE JURYMAN

     “Don’t you see, brother, I was reading yesterday the Gospel
     about Christ, the little Father; how He suffered, how He walked
     on the earth.  I suppose you have heard about it?”

     “Indeed, I have,” replied Stepanuitch; “but we are people in
     darkness; we can’t read.”—­Tolstoi.

Mr. Henry Bosengate, of the London Stock Exchange, seated himself in his car that morning during the great war with a sense of injury.  Major in a Volunteer Corps; member of all the local committees; lending this very car to the neighbouring hospital, at times even driving it himself for their benefit; subscribing to funds, so far as his diminished income permitted—­he was conscious of being an asset to the country, and one whose time could not be wasted with impunity.  To be summoned to sit on a jury at the local assizes, and not even the grand jury at that!  It was in the nature of an outrage.

Strong and upright, with hazel eyes and dark eyebrows, pinkish-brown cheeks, a forehead white, well-shaped, and getting high, with greyish hair glossy and well-brushed, and a trim moustache, he might have been taken for that colonel of Volunteers which indeed he was in a fair way of becoming.

His wife had followed him out under the porch, and stood bracing her supple body clothed in lilac linen.  Red rambler roses formed a sort of crown to her dark head; her ivory-coloured face had in it just a suggestion of the Japanese.

Mr. Bosengate spoke through the whirr of the engine: 

“I don’t expect to be late, dear.  This business is ridiculous.  There oughtn’t to be any crime in these days.”