"Quick!"

"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing.

"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot,
sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. 'Gene, see if you can open
the olives with this fool can opener. I tried."

There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy;
what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just
hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three
days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she knew
that her prayers were answered.

Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't quite
twenty-one, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely."
She was almost hysterical.

Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt
Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said
nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora
took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted colour marking her
cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of the
recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing
up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the
floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted
curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and
crafty look.

"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My
nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something or
other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more
economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could he
do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children--"

H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at
the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her
teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.

Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her
hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood there,
she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and
simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own
affairs, must have marked it.

The girl's head came up, stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel
Oakley."

Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he had
been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She and
Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak becau