“I haven’t any respect for my mother,” young Hugh told her one day.  “I like her like a sister.”

She was deeply pleased at this attitude; she did not wish their respect as a visible quality.  Vision after vision came of the old times and care-free days while the four, as happy and normal a family as lived in the world, passed their alert, full days together before the war.  Memory after memory took form in the brain of the woman, the center of that light-hearted life so lately changed, so entirely now a memory.  War had come.

At first, in 1914, there had been excitement, astonishment.  Then the horror of Belgium.  One refused to believe that at first; it was a lurid slander on the kindly German people; then one believed with the brain; one’s spirit could not grasp it.  Unspeakable deeds such as the Germans’ deeds—­it was like a statement made concerning a fourth dimension of space; civilized modern folk were not so organized as to realize the facts of that bestiality.

“Aren’t you thankful we’re Americans?” the woman had said over and over.

One day her husband, answering usually with a shake of the head, answered in words.  “We may be in it yet,” he said.  “I’m not sure but we ought to be.”

Brock, twenty-one then, had flashed at her:  “I want to be in it.  I may just have to be, mother.”

Young Hugh yawned a bit at that, and stretching his long arm, he patted his brother’s shoulder.  “Good old hero, Brock!  I’ll beat you a set of tennis.  Come on.”

That sudden speech of Brock’s had startled her, had brought the war, in a jump which was like a stab, close.  The war and Lindow—­their place—­how was it possible that this nightmare in Europe could touch the peace of the garden, the sunlit view of the river, the trees with birds singing in them, the scampering of the dogs down the drive?  The distant hint of any connection between the great horror and her own was pain; she put the thought away.

Then the Lusitania was sunk.  All America shouted shame through sobs of rage.  The President wrote a beautiful and entirely satisfactory note.

“It should be war—­war.  It should be war today,” Hugh had said, her husband.  “We only waste time.  We’ll have to fight sooner or later.  The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll finish.”

“Fight!” young Hugh threw at him.  “What with?  We can just about make faces at ’em, father.”

The boy’s father did not laugh.  “We had better get ready to do more than make faces; we’ve got to get ready.”  He hammered his hand on the stone balustrade.  “I’m going to Plattsburg this summer, Evelyn.”

“I’m going with you.”  Brock’s voice was low and his mouth set, and the woman, looking at him, saw suddenly that her boy was a man.

“Well, then, as man power is getting low at Lindow, I’ll stay and take care of Mummy.  Won’t I?  We’ll do awfully well without them, won’t we, Mum?  You can drive Dad’s Rolls-Royce roadster, and if you leave on the handbrake up-hill, I’ll never tell.”