te, not sure that he wanted his dinner just then. It
would have amazed him to face the fact deliberately that perhaps he
preferred being with Dora Yocum to eating. However, he faced no such
fact, nor any fact, but lingered.

"Well--" he said again.

"You'd better go."

"I guess I can get my dinner pretty near any time. I don't--" He had a
thought. "Did you--"

"Did I what?"

"Did you have your dinner before I met you?"

"No."

"Well, aren't you--"

She shook her head. "I don't want any."

"Why not?"

"I don't think people have very much appetite to-day and yesterday," she
said, with the hint of a sad laugh, "all over America."

"No; I guess that's so."

"It's too terrible!" she said. "I can't sit and eat when I think of the
_Lusitania_--of all those poor, poor people strangling in the water--"

"No; I guess nobody can eat much, if they think about that."

"And of what it's going to bring, if we let it," she went on. "As if
this killing weren't enough, we want to add _our_ killing! Oh, that's
the most terrible thing of all--the thing it makes within us! Don't you
understand?"

She turned to him appealingly, and he felt queerer than ever. Dusk had
fallen. Where they stood, under the young-leaved maple tree, there
was but a faint lingering of afterglow, and in this mystery her face
glimmered wan and sweet; so that Ramsey, just then, was like one who
discovers an old pan, used in the kitchen, to be made of chased silver.

"Well, I don't feel much like dinner right now," he said. "We--we could
sit here awhile on this bench, prob'ly."

Chapter XV

Ramsey kept very few things from Fred Mitchell, and usually his
confidences were immediate upon the occasion of them; but allowed
several weeks to elapse before sketching for his roommate the outlines
of this adventure.

"One thing that was kind o' funny about it, Fred," he said, "I didn't
know what to call her."

Mr. Mitchell, stretched upon the window seat in their "study," and
looking out over the town street below and the campus beyond the street,
had already thought it tactful to ambush his profound amusement by
turning upon his side, so that his face was toward the window and away
from his companion. "What did you want to call her?" he inquired in a
serious voice. "Names?"

"No. You know what I mean. I mean I had to just keep callin' her 'you';
and that gets kind of freaky when you're talkin' to anybody a good while
like that. When she'd b