he had known
all his life. "You blessed boy of mine, I will hold my fire." And then
Hugh had all but knocked her over with a violent kiss again, and he
slammed happily through the screen doors and was leaping up the stairs.
Ten minutes later she heard the car purring down the drive.

The dogs settled about her with long dog-sighs again. She looked at her
wrist--only five-thirty. She went back with a new unrest to her
thoughts. Hugh's knee--it was odd; it had lasted a long time, ever
since--she shuddered a bit, so that old Mavourneen lifted her head and
objected softly--ever since war was declared. Over a year! To be sure,
he had hurt it again badly, slipping on the ice in December, just as it
was getting strong. She wished that his father would not be so grim when
Hugh's bad knee was mentioned. What did he mean? Did he dare to think
her boy--the word was difficult even mentally--a slacker? With that her
mind raced back to the days just before Hugh had hurt this knee. It was
in February that Germany had proclaimed the oceans closed except along
German paths, at German times. "This is war at last," her husband had
said, and she knew the inevitable had come.

Night after night she had lain awake facing it, sometimes breaking down
utterly and shaking her soul out in sobs, sometimes trying to see ways
around the horror, trying to believe that war must end before our troops
could get ready, often with higher courage glorying that she might give
so much for country and humanity. Then, in the nights, things that she
had read far back, unrealizing, rose and confronted her with
awful reality. Brutalities, atrocities, wounds, barbarous
captivity--nightmares which the Germans had dug out of the grave of
savagery and sent stalking over the earth--such rose and stood before
the woman lying awake night after night. At first her soul hid its face
in terror at the gruesome thoughts; at first her mind turned and fled
and refused to believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! It was not credible,
it was not reasonable, it was out of drawing that her good boys, her
precious boys trained to be happy and help the world, to live useful,
peaceful lives, should be snatched from home, here in America, and
pitched into the ghastly struggle of Europe. Push back the ocean as she
might, the ocean surged every day nearer.

Daytimes she was as brave as the best. She could say: "If we had done it
the day after the _Lusitania_, that would have been right. It