“I’ll kill myself first!”

“You wouldn’t have me a quitter, little mother.  You wouldn’t have the other fellows in my crowd at college go out and do what I haven’t got the guts to do.  You want me to hold up my head with the best of ’em.”

“I don’t want nothing but my boy!  I—­”

“Us college men got to be the first to show that the fighting backbone of the country is where it belongs.  If us fellows with education don’t set the example, what can we expect from the other fellows?  Don’t ask me to be a quitter, mother.  I couldn’t!  I wouldn’t!  My country needs us, mother—­you and me—­”

“Edwin!  Edwin!”

“Attention, little mother—­stand!”

She lay back her head, laughing, crying, sobbing, choking.

“O God—­take him and bring him back—­to me!”

On a day when sky and water were so identically blue that they met in perfect horizon, the S. S. Rowena, sleek-flanked, mounted fore and aft with a pair of black guns that lifted snouts slightly to the impeccable blue, slipped quietly, and without even a newspaper sailing-announcement into a frivolous midstream that kicked up little lace edged wavelets, undulating flounces of them.  A blur of faces rose above deck-rails, faces that, looking back, receded finally.  The last flag and the last kerchief became vapor.  Against the pier-edge, frantically, even perilously forward, her small flag thrust desperately beyond the rail, Mrs. Ross, who had lost a saving sense of time and place, leaned after that ship receding in majesty, long after it had curved from view.

The crowd, not a dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly, thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city.  Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing out and quivering for the smell of war.  Finally, he too, turned back reluctantly.

Now only Mrs. Ross.  An hour she stood there, a solitary figure at the rail, holding to her large black hat, her skirts whipped to her body and snapping forward in the breeze.  The sun struck off points from the water, animating it with a jewel-dance.  It found out in a flash the diamond-and-sapphire top to her gold-mesh hand-bag, hoppity-skippiting from facet to facet.

“My boy—­my little boy!”

A pair of dock-hands, wiping their hands on cotton-waste, came after a while to the door of the pier-house to observe and comment.  Conscious of that observation, she moved then through the great dank sheds in and among the bales and boxes, down a flight of stairs and out to the cobbled street.  Her motor-car, the last at the entrance, stood off at a slant, the chauffeur lopping slightly and dozing, his face scarcely above the steering-wheel.  She passed him with unnecessary stealth, her heels occasionally wedging between the cobbles and jerking her up.  Two hours