“Right. You just keep an eye on this wreck until someone from the R. A. F. comes along.”

“A Royal Air Force man.” The boy grinned again. “I’ll sure enough be glad to meet one.”

“You’ll get a chance, all right,” Brand promised. “They won’t miss this.”

To Dave he said: “Come on. We’ll go down now.”

They made their way through the shadows cast by young trees in silence. Arrived at the upper side of the broad meadow overlooking the homestead and the village beyond, as if struck by the beauty of the view, they paused to stand there motionless.

How different were their thoughts at that moment!

The American boy was thinking: “How strangely beautiful it all is, as if it had been arranged with great care so that a famous artist might paint it.”

It was just that—the farmhouse built of native stone, centuries old, stood in the midst of orchards and gardens all green and gold with the colors of autumn. Brightest speck of all was Cherry sitting on the gray rocks.

“How like a sprite she is,” Dave was thinking. “And how like an angel she can sing!”

Beyond the farmstead was a broad, green pasture dotted with black and white cattle. To the right of this its walls shattered but still upright, a great, gray Norman castle cast a long, dark shadow.

“It’s like the shadow of war on a weary world,” the boy thought.

As his gaze turned to the left his face brightened. “The village,” he whispered. Never before, he thought, had there been such a village. With its winding street following the whimsical meandering of a narrow stream, with its houses set irregularly along hillsides that sloped away on either side, with gardens running back to the edge of a great grove of beech, oak and yew trees, it all seemed part of a picture-book dream.

“And yet,” he thought, “the people in that village are quite human. They are kind, simple and good. The baker, the blacksmith, the cobbler, and all the rest,—how really wonderful they are! And so kind to a stranger! And yet,”—He was thinking what it might be like tomorrow, or the day after—if the war lasted. And it would last!

As for Brand, he was thinking quite simply and steadfastly, “That’s my home down there. It’s always been 

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