destruction of the _Clara_?"

"Yes, I heard of the destruction of the _Clara_," he echoed, with a
sneer. "If I had my way the whole rotten fleet would follow her to the
bottom of the ocean!"

"Why, Jake!" was Abbie's best.

Jake went on: "And it will, too, or I'm a liar. The Germans will get
them boats as fast as they build 'em." He laughed. "I tell you them
Kaiser-boys just eats ships."

"But how were they able to destroy the _Clara_?" Mamise demanded.

"Easiest thing you know. When she laid up at Norfolk they just put a
bomb into her."

"But how did they know she was going to Norfolk to load?"

"Oh, we--they have ways."

The little slip from "we" to "they" caught Mamise's ear. Her first
intuition of its meaning was right, and out of her amazement the first
words that leaped were:

"Poor Abbie!"

Thought, like lightning, breaks through the air in a quick slash from
cloud to ground. Mamise's whole thought was from zig to zag in some
such procedure as this, but infinitely swift.

"We--they? That means that Jake considers himself a part of the German
organization for destruction, the will to ruin. That means that Jake
must have been involved in the wreck of the _Clara_. That means that
he deliberately connived at a crime against his country. That means
that he is a traitor as well as a murderer. That means that my sister
is the wife of a fiend. Poor Abbie!"

This thought stunned and blinded Mamise a long moment. She heard Jake
grumbling:

"What ya mean--'poor Abbie!'?"

Mamise was afraid to say. She cast one glance at Jake, and the
lightning of understanding struck him. He realized what she was
thinking--or at least he suspected it, because he was thinking of his
own past. He was realizing that he had met Nicky Easton through
Mamise, though Mamise did not know this--that is, he hoped she did
not. And yet perhaps she did.

And now Mamise and Jake were mutually afraid of each other. Abbie
was altogether in the dark, and a little jealous of Mamise and
her peculiar secrets, but her general mood was one of stolid
thoughtlessness.

Jake, suspecting Mamise's suspicion of him, was moved to justify
himself by one of his tirades against society in general. Abbie, who
had about as much confidence in the world as an old rabbit in a doggy
country, had heard Jake thunder so often that his denunciations had
become as vaguely lulling as a continual surf. Generalizations meant
nothing to her bovine soul. She was th