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 wi............