“I wish you would speak to her,” he said.  “I wish you could manage to find time to be here more in the evenings.  Edith worries so much and she’s trying so hard.  A little sympathy now and then—­”

“But she doesn’t seem to want any from me,” said his daughter, a bit impatiently.  “I know it’s hard—­of course it is.  But what can I do?  She won’t let me help.  And besides—­there are other families, you know—­thousands—­really suffering—­for the lack of all that we have here.”  She smiled and kissed him quickly.  “Good-night, dad dear, I’ve got to run.”

And the door closed behind her.

CHAPTER XXVIII

After dinner that night, in the living room the two older children studied their lessons and Edith sat mending a pair of rompers for little Tad.  Presently Roger came out from his den with the evening paper in his hand and sat down close beside her.  He did this conscientiously almost every evening.  With a sigh he opened his paper to read, again there was silence in the room, and in this silence Roger’s mind roamed far away across the sea.

For the front page of his paper was filled with the usual headlines, tidings which a year before would have made a man’s heart jump into his throat, but which were getting commonplace now.  Dead and wounded by the thousands, famine, bombs and shrapnel, hideous atrocities, submarines and floating mines, words once remote but now familiar, always there on the front page and penetrating into his soul, becoming a part of Roger Gale, so that never again when the war was done would he be the same man he was before.  For he had forever lost his faith in the sanity and steadiness of the great mind of humanity.  Roger had thought of mankind as mature, but there had come to him of late the same feeling he had had before in the bosom of his family.  Mankind had suddenly unmasked and shown itself for what it was—­still only a precocious child, with a terrible precocity.  For its growth had been one sided.  Its strength was growing at a speed breathless and astounding.  But its vision and its poise, its sense of human justice, of kindliness and tolerance and of generous brotherly love, these had been neglected and were being left behind.  Vaguely he thought of its ships of steel, its railroads and its flaming mills, its miracles, its prodigies.  And the picture rose in his mind of a child, standing there of giant’s size with dangerous playthings in its hands, and boastfully declaring,

“I can thunder over the earth, dive in the ocean, soar on the clouds!  I can shiver to atoms a mountain, I can drench whole lands with blood!  I can look up and laugh at God!”

And Roger frowned as he read the news.  What strange new century lay ahead?  What convulsing throes of change?  What was in store for his children?  Tighter set his heavy jaw.

“It shall be good,” he told himself with a grim determination.  “For them there shall be better things.  Something great and splendid shall come out of it at last.  They will look back upon this time as I look on the French Revolution.”