in and be there! I would love to pick those golden
apples, and to blow those trumpets, and to play about with the children
by the water.'

He gazed with wistful longing in his eyes; then from the inside of the
gates his glance tell upon a dark corner outside in the picture. And
this was the angel shutting out a little group of people who were
begging to be let in. They were dressed in filthy rags, their faces
were wretched, and several were weeping bitterly. No light from the
golden city seemed to fall upon them, and Bobby noticed, through the
darkness that seemed all round them, that their feet were close to the
edge of a precipice.

As he looked at them the tears came into his eyes; and when he heard
Nurse's voice call to him he started violently. He could hardly
believe he was in the library, and was going up to his sunny nursery.
He had been in the picture for such a long time, and so very far away.

Very carefully he put the Bible back in its place and ran out of the
room.

'Nurse,' he said a little later, as he was eating his dinner in the
nursery, 'do you know a story in the Bible about some big lovely gates,
and angels, and a street all gold, and trees with gold apples, and
lovely flowers, and everybody smiling, and then, outside the gates,
some poor, unhappy crying people being shut out in the dark and rain?
It's rather near the end of the book.'

'Oh, I expect it's a picture of heaven,' said Nurse, 'and the wicked
people being shut out.'

'But,' said Bobby, with anxious eyes, 'are many bodies shut outside of
heaven? Can't they never get in?'

'Now, eat your dinner and don't talk so much! There are no wicked
people in heaven. It is only good little boys who go there.'

An awful fear clutched at Bobby's heart, but he could not put it into
words. He had taken it for granted that everybody who died went
straight to heaven. The picture of those weeping men and women outside
the gates, and the sad stern face of the angel who was shutting them
out, haunted him. He was very quiet indeed; and when Nurse took him
off to church a little later, he never spoke a word. They walked along
the high-road for a short distance, then turned up a lane with high
banks and hedges, and at last came to the little country church, with
some shady elms and beeches casting cool shadows across the sunny
churchyard. It was a children's service, and the Sunday-school
children were filing in before them. Bobby followed