come, her mind grew mutinous and balked. She
confessed her poverty of ideas.

The girl, Bettina, sulked; the boy screamed:

"Aw, botheration! We might as well say our prayers and go to bed."

In the least pious of moods they dropped from her knees to their own
and put their clasped hands across her lap. They became in a way
hallowed by their attitude, and the world seemed good to her again as
she looked down at the two children, beautiful as only children can
be, innocent of wile, of hardship and of crime, safe at home and
praying to their heavenly Father from whose presence they had so
recently come.

But as she brooded over them motherly and took strength from them as
mothers do, she thought of other children in other countries orphaned
in swarms, starving in multitudes, waiting for food like flocks of
lambs in the blizzard of the war. She thought still more vividly of
children flung into the ocean. She had seen these children at her
knees fighting against bitter medicines, choking on them and blurting
them out at mouth and nose and almost, it seemed, at eyes. So it was
very vivid to her how children thrown into the sea must have gagged
with terror at the bitter medicine of death, strangled and smothered
as they drowned.

She heard the prayers mumbled through, but at the hasty "Amen" she
protested.

"You didn't thank God for anything. Haven't you anything to thank God
for?"

If they had expressed any doubt, she would have told them of dozens of
special mercies, but almost instantly they answered, "Oh yes!" They
looked at each other, understood, nodded, clapped their hands, and
chuckled with pride. Then they bent their heads, gabled their
finger-tips, and the boy said:

"We t'ank Dee, O Dod, for making sink dat old _Lusitania_." And the
girl said, "A-men!"

Marie Louise gave a start as if she had been stabbed. It was the loss
of the _Lusitania_ that had first terrified her. She had just seen it
announced on the placards of newsboys in London streets, and had fled
home to escape from the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven
for it! She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from
their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in wondering
fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and
down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself
that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more
repulsive for their very innocence. The pur