The city took them in, gave them sanctuary, and forgot them. But
the shepherds with the cunning eyes remembered.

Lily Cardew, standing in the train shed one morning early in March,
watched such a line go by. She watched it with interest. She had
developed a new interest in people during the year she had been
away. She had seen, in the army camp, similar shuffling lines of
men, transformed in a few hours into ranks of uniformed soldiers,
beginning already to be actuated by the same motive. These aliens,
going by, would become citizens. Very soon now they would appear
on the streets in new American clothes of extraordinary cut and
color, their hair cut with clippers almost to the crown, and
surmounted by derby hats always a size too small.

Lily smiled, and looked out for her mother. She was suddenly
unaccountably glad to be back again. She liked the smoke and the
noise, the movement, the sense of things doing. And the sight of
her mother, small, faultlessly tailored, wearing a great bunch of
violets, and incongruous in that work-a-day atmosphere, set her
smiling again.

How familiar it all was! And heavens, how young she looked! The
limousine was at the curb, and a footman as immaculately turned
out as her mother stood with a folded rug over his arm. On the
seat inside lay a purple box. Lily had known it would be there.
They would be ostensibly from her father, because he had not been
able to meet her, but she knew quite well that Grace Cardew had
stopped at the florist's on her way downtown and bought them.

A little surge of affection for her mother warmed the girl's eyes.