ake it very seriously. As for Gerhardt, he became extremely silent,
so that it was ever more and more difficult to tell what he was feeling.
The patriotism of the newspapers took a considerable time to affect the
charity of the citizens of Putney, and so long as no neighbour showed
signs of thinking that little Gerhardt was a monster and a spy it was
fairly easy for Mrs. Gerhardt to sleep at night, and to read her papers
with the feeling that the remarks in them were not really intended for
Gerhardt and herself. But she noticed that her man had given up reading
them, and would push them away from his eyes if, in the tiny
sitting-room with the heavily-flowered walls, they happened to rest
beside him. He had perhaps a closer sense of impending Fate than she.
The boy, David, went to his first work, and the girls to their school,
and so things dragged on through that first long war winter and spring.
Mrs. Gerhardt, in the intervals of doing everything, knitted socks for
"our poor cold boys in the trenches," but Gerhardt no longer sought out
little jobs to do in the houses of his neighbours. Mrs. Gerhardt thought
that he "fancied" they would not like it. It was early in that spring
that she took a deaf aunt to live with them, the wife of her mother's
brother, no blood-relation, but the poor woman had nowhere else to go;
so David was put to sleep on the horsehair sofa in the sitting-room
because she "couldn't refuse the poor thing." And then, of an April
afternoon, while she was washing the household sheets, her neighbour,
Mrs. Clirehugh, a little spare woman all eyes, cheekbones, hair, and
decision, came in breathless and burst out:

"Oh! Mrs. Gerhardt, 'ave you 'eard? They've sunk the _Loositania_! Has I
said to Will: Isn't it horful?"

Mrs. Gerhardt, with her round arms dripping soap-suds, answered: "What a
dreadful thing! The poor drowning people! Dear! Oh dear!"

"Oh! Those Huns! I'd shoot the lot, I would!"

"They _are_ wicked!" Mrs. Gerhardt echoed: "That was a dreadful thing to
do!"

But it was not till Gerhardt came in at five o'clock, white as a sheet,
that she perceived how this dreadful catastrophe affected them.

"I have been called a German," were the first words he uttered; "Dollee,
I have been called a German."

"Well, so you are, my dear," said Mrs. Gerhardt.

"You do not see," he answered, with a heat and agitation which surprised
her. "I tell you this _Lusitania_ will finish our business. They will