his
predicament there. Anything was better than this constant indirectness
of gaining his father's views through his mother.

Had he done so, things would have been different later. But by continual
suggestion a vision of his father as hard, detached, immovable, had been
built up in his mind. He got as far as the door, hesitated, turned back.

It was Marion herself who solved the mystery of Natalie's changed
attitude, when Graham told of it that night. She sat listening, her eyes
slightly narrowed, restlessly turning her engagement ring.

"Well, at least that's something," she said, noncommittally. But in her
heart she knew, as one designing woman may know another. She knew
that Natalie had made Graham promise not to enlist at once, if war was
declared, and now she knew that she was desperately preparing to carry
her fear for Graham a step further, even at the cost of having her in
the family.

She smiled wryly. But there was triumph in the smile, too. She had them
now. The time would come when they would crawl to her to marry Graham,
to keep him from going to war. Then she would make her own terms.

In the meantime the thing was to hold him by every art she knew.

There was another girl, somewhere. She had been more frightened about
that than she cared to admit, even to herself. She must hold him close.

She used every art she knew. She deliberately inflamed him. And the
vicious circle closed in about him, Natalie and Marion and Anna Klein.
And to offset them, only Delight Haverford, at evening prayer in
Saint Luke's, and voicing a tiny petition for him, that he might walk
straight, that he might find peace, even if that peace should be war.

CHAPTER XXIX

Herman Klein, watch between forefinger and thumb, climbed heavily to
Anna's room. She heard him pause outside the door, and her heart almost
stopped beating. She had been asleep, and rousing at his step, she had
felt under the pillow for her watch to see the time. It was not there.

She remembered then; she had left it below, on the table. And he was
standing outside her door. She heard him scratching a match, striking it
against the panel of her door. For so long as it would take the match to
burn out, she heard him there, breathing heavily. Then the knob turned.

She leaped out of the bed in a panic of fear. The hall, like the room,
was dark, and she felt his ponderous body in the doorway, rather than
saw it.

"You will put on something and come