irred a
girl's fancy, nor did he know that the gloomy something which clouded
his eyes made Betty Gower want to comfort him.

"I think I understand," she said evenly,--when in truth she did not
understand at all. "But after a while you'll be glad. I know I should be
if I were in the army, although of course no matter how horrible it all
was it had to be done. For a long time I wanted to go to France myself,
to do _something_. I was simply wild to go. But they wouldn't let me."

"And I," MacRae said slowly, "didn't want to go at all--and I had to
go."

"Oh," she remarked with a peculiar interrogative inflection. Her
eyebrows lifted. "Why did you have to? You went over long before the
draft was thought of."

"Because I'd been taught that my flag and country really meant
something," he said. "That was all; and it was quite enough in the way
of compulsion for a good many like myself who didn't hanker to stick
bayonets through men we'd never seen, nor shoot them, nor blow them up
with hand grenades, nor kill them ten thousand feet in the air and watch
them fall, turning over and over like a winged duck. But these things
seemed necessary. They said a country worth living in was worth fighting
for."

"And isn't it?" Betty Gower challenged promptly.

MacRae looked at her and at the white cottage, at the great Gulf seas
smashing on the rocks below, at the far vista of sea and sky and the
shore line faintly purple in the distance. His gaze turned briefly to
the leafless tops of maple and alder rising out of the hollow in which
his father's body lay--in a corner of the little plot that was left of
all their broad acres--and came back at last to this fair daughter of
his father's enemy.

"The country is, yes," he said. "Anything that's worth having is worth
fighting for. But that isn't what they meant, and that isn't the way it
has worked out."

He was not conscious of the feeling in his voice. He was thinking with
exaggerated bitterness that the Germans in Belgium had dealt less hardly
with a conquered people than this girl's father had dealt with his.

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by that," she
remarked. Her tone was puzzled. She looked at him, frankly curious.

But he could not tell her what he meant. He had a feeling that she was
in no way responsible. He had an instinctive aversion to rudeness. And
while he was absolving himself of any intention to make war on her he
was wondering if her moth