you can't explain because it's partly
true. It will keep cropping up always, and how I am ever going to live
it down I don't know. Oh, I don't know!"

He flung himself into a chair, thrust his hands deep into his
trousers' pockets and stared despairingly into some forbidding
distance. She grew sympathetic then, and consoling, and went to him
and put her arm around his neck and laid her face against his head and
tried to comfort him.

"Never mind, dearie! So long as you, yourself, know that you love the
flag, and so long as I know it, we can afford to wait for other people
to find it out."

"No, mother, we can't. They've got to be shown. I can't live this way.
Some way or other I've got to prove that I'm no coward and I'm no
traitor."

"You're too severe with yourself, Pen. There are other ways, perhaps
better ways, for men to prove that they love their country besides
fighting for her. To be a good citizen may be far more patriotic than
to be a good soldier."

"I know. That's one of the things I've learned, and I believe it. And
that'll do for most fellows, but it won't do for me. My case is
different. I mistreated the flag once with my hands and arms and feet
and my whole body, and I've got to give my hands and arms and feet and
my whole body now to make up for it. There's no other way. I couldn't
make the thing right in a thousand years simply by being a good
citizen. Don't you see, mother? Don't you understand?"

He looked up into her face with tear filled eyes. The thought that had
long been with him that he must prove his patriotism by personal
sacrifice, had grown during these last few days into a settled
conviction and a great desire. He wanted her to see the situation as
he saw it, and to feel with him the bitterness of his disappointment.
And she did. She twined her arm more closely about his neck and
pressed her lips against his hair.

But her heart-felt sympathy made too great a draft on his emotional
nature. It silenced his voice and flooded his eyes. So she drew her
chair up beside him, and he laid his head in her lap as he had used
to do when he was a very little boy, and wept out his disappointment
and grief.

And as he lay there a new thought came to him. Swiftly as a whirlwind
forms and sweeps across the land, it took on form and motion and swept
through the channels of his mind. He sprang to his feet, dashed the
tears from his face, and looked down on his mother with a countenance
transfor