ring for Madeleine?"

"No. Graham is bringing me a sleeping-powder."

"If you are not sleepy, may I talk to you about some things?"

"I'm sick, Clay. My head is bursting."

"Sometimes it helps to talk out our worries, dear." He was still
determinedly gentle.

He heard her turning her pillow, and settling herself more comfortably.

"Not to you. You've made up your mind. What's the use?"

"Made up my mind to what?"

"To sending Graham to be killed."

"That's hardly worthy of you, Natalie," he said gravely. "He is my son,
too. I love him at least as much as you do. I don't think this is really
up to us, anyhow. It is up to him. If he wants to go?"

She sat up, suddenly, her voice thin and high.

"How does he know what he wants?" she demanded. "He's too young. He
doesn't know what war is; you say so yourself. You say he is too young
to have a position worth while at the plant, but of course he's old
enough to go to war and have a leg shot off, or to be blinded, or
something." Her voice broke.

He sat down on the bed and felt around until he found her hand. But she
jerked it from him.

"You promised me once to let him make his own decision if the time
came."

"When did I promise that?"

"In the fall, when I came home from England."

"I never made such a promise."

"Will you make it now?"

"No!"

He rose, more nearly despairing than he had ever been. He could not
argue with a hysterical woman. He hated cowardice, but far deeper
than that was his conviction that she had already exacted some sort of
promise. And the boy was not like her in that respect. He regarded a
promise as almost in the nature of an oath. He himself had taught him
that in the creed of a gentleman a promise was a thing of his honor, to
be kept at any cost.

"You are compelling me to do a strange and hateful thing," he said. "If
you intend to use your influence to keep him out, I shall have to offset
it by urging him to go. That is putting a very terrible responsibility
on me."

He heard her draw her breath sharply.

"If you do that I shall leave you," she said, in a frozen voice.

Suddenly he felt sorry for her. She was so weak, so childish, so
cowardly. And this was the nearest they had come to a complete break.

"You're tired and nervous," he said. "We have come a long way from what
I started out to say. And a long way from--the way things used to
be between us. If this thing, to-night, does not bring two people
together--