Father Beckett and Julian watched Morel, giving him a word or a hand now and then. Dierdre and Brian sauntered away, deep in argument over Irish politics (it's come to that between them: and Dierdre actually _listens_ to Brian!). Mother Beckett drifted into talk of Jim, as she loves to do with me, and I wandered, hand in hand with her, back into his childhood. Blue dusk was falling like a rain of dead violets--just that peculiar, faded blue; and as I was absorbed in the tale of a nursery fire (Jim, at six, playing the hero) I had no eyes for scenery. I was but vaguely aware that not far off loomed a gateway, adorned with a figure of the Virgin. A curving avenue led to shadowy, neglected lawns, dimly suggesting some faded romance of history.
Presently, from between the open gates came a man in khaki, accompanied by a tall, slim, and graceful dog. It was he, not the man, that caught my eye and for an instant snatched my thought from Little Boy Jim rescuing a rocking-horse at the risk of his life. He was a police dog with the dignity of a prince and the lightness of a plume.
"Lovely creature!" I said to myself, as he and the khaki man swung toward us down the road. And I wished that Brian could see him, for the dog Brian loved and lost at the Front was a Belgian police dog.
Perhaps, Padre, Brian wrote you about his wonderful pet, that he thought worthy to name after the dog-star Sirius. I've forgotten to ask if he did write; but I seldom had a letter from him from the trenches that didn't mention Sirius. Everyone seemed to adore the dog, which developed into a regimental mascot. What his early history was can never be known: but Brian rescued him from a burning château in Belgium, just as Jim rescued the rocking-horse of Mother Beckett's nursery story, though with rather more risk! It was a château where some hidden tragedy must have been enacted, because the Germans took possession of it with the family still there--such of the family as wasn't fighting: two young married women, sisters, wives of brothers. But when the Germans ran before the British, and fired the château as they went, not a creature living or dead was left in the house--except the dog--and nothing has ever been heard of the sisters.