The child Cecily waited until her brother had made a bridge from a fallen
bough, and then clasping her adorably grubby hands about his neck allowed
him to carry her across the stream.
“Which way, little sister?” he asked.
A dragon-fly hovered above the water and then darted away, and Cecily
with a vague idea of following it chose a sunken path that almost traced
the brook in its course. It was a silent little stream running through
the sleepy meadows, and where it widened among the pond lilies it almost
stopped. Here and there it eddied self-consciously about the yellow
flowers and further on it almost rippled in shy haste. And in the golden
afternoon Cecily knew that the boy, so clever at building bridges, so
capable in the midst of barbed wire, and above all, so kind to her, was
wonderful beyond all telling.
* * * * *
When three tiny aeroplanes flew above the trenches, it reminded the boy
of the dragon-flies over the brook at home, and once when he crawled
through the mud and helped cut away some barbed wire, the barbed wire
made him think of a bit of the brook which ran through the pasture. He
remembered the wire had made a breakwater of drifting leaves and that
Cecily had thrown stones at the leaves until they had slowly floated away
in a great clump. And because he imagined himself a victim of unmanly
sentiment, he detested these memories; so that after a while they
returned no more.
At the training camp he had learned, or thought he had learned, the trick
of withdrawing a bayonet after a supposedly unparried lunge. But here as
he slipped in the wet snow trying to release the driven bayonet, the
thing caught and tore and ripped the flesh. And to keep from falling he
crushed and mangled the face beneath him with his heel. . .
* * * * *
Cecily in the twilight pressed her face against the window pane. The
gaunt branch of a tree waved and pointed across the snow, but the little
frozen stream was hidden away.
The child thought that when the boy returned he would still be wonderful.
_Randolph Edgar_.