Adele said----"

"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It's
this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People got
scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash."

"Speculating with it, were you?"

"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals."

"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me."

"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it,
and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to for
the money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that."

Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for the
children, anyway. They won't need it now."

He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won't
they?"

"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream."

"Eugene?"

"Yes."

"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and
presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About this
money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understand
these things, but I can talk to you. It's like this----"

"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm doing
it, not for you, but for Flora, and Della--and Eugene. Flora has lived
such a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew any
of you. Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feeling
that Della and Eugene are my children--were my children."

When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was
getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers," he said.

"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And she's
lived her little, narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats
and her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mother
suffers--poor Sophy."

"Um," Baldwin grunted.

When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the War
Department, Aunt Sophy was so calm it might have appeared that Flora
had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora. Sophy
neglected everything to give comfort to the stricken two.

"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sit
there like that! Even if you weren't his mother, surely you must feel
something."

"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy.

"What difference does that make!"

AMERICAN RED CROSS
(Croix Rouge Americaine)

MY DEAR MRS. BALDW