* * * * *

Long after they had left the house, he kept thinking over all they had said.  What an amazing time they had had, the two young scalawags.

Deborah was still in the room.  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 had so often done before.  For Deborah, too, was a pioneer.  She, too, had lived in the wilderness.  Clearing roads through jungles?  Yes.  And freeing slaves of ignorance and building a nation of new men.  And now she was doggedly fighting to save what she had builded—­not from the raids of the Indians but from the ravages of this war which was sweeping civilization aside.  With her school behind her, so to speak, she stood facing this great enemy with stern and angry, steady eyes.  Her pioneer grandmother come to life.