om. As she sat working at her desk, her back was
turned and she did not speak. But little by little her father's mood
changed. Of course she was right, he admitted. For now they were gone, the
spell they had cast was losing a part of its glamor. Yes, their talk had
been pretty raw. Sheer unthinking selfishness, a bold rush for plunder and
a dash to get away, trampling over people half crazed, women and children
in panicky crowds, and leaving behind them, so to speak, Laura's joyous
rippling laugh over their own success in the game. Yes, there was no
denying the fact that Hal was rushing headlong into a savage dangerous
game, a scramble and a gamble, with adventurers from all over Europe
gathering here and making a little world of their own. He would work and
live at a feverish pitch, and Laura would go it as hard as he. Roger
thought he could see their winter ahead. How they would pile up money and
spend!

All at once, as though some figure silent and invisible were standing close
beside him, from far back in his childhood a memory flashed into his mind
of a keen and clear October night, when Roger, a little shaver of nine, had
stood with his mother in front of the farmhouse and listened to the faint
sharp roll of a single drum far down in the valley. And his mother's grip
had hurt his hand, and a lump had risen in his throat--as Dan, his oldest
brother, had marched away with his company of New Hampshire mountain boys.
"We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more." Dan had been
killed at Shiloh.

And it must be like that now in France. No, he did not like the look which
he had seen on Laura's face as she had talked about the war and the fat
profits to be made. Was this all we Yankees had to say to the people over
in Europe?

Frowning and glancing at Deborah's back, he saw that she was tired. It was
nearly midnight, but still she kept working doggedly on, moving her
shoulder muscles at times as though to shake off aches and pains, then
bending again to her labor, her fight against such heavy odds in the winter
just beginning for those children in the tenements. He recalled a fragment
of the appeal she had made to him only the month before:

"Can't you see that we're all of us stunned, and trying to see what war
will mean to all the children in the world? And while we're groping,
groping, can't we give each other a hand?"

And as he looked at his daughter, she made him think of her grandmother,
as she