Father and son had gone off for the month in camp, and, glad as she was to have the younger boy with her, there was yet an uneasy, an almost subconscious feeling about him, which she indignantly denied each time that it raised its head.  It never quite phrased itself, this fear, this wonder if Hugh were altogether as American as his father and brother.  Question the courage and patriotism of her own boy?  She flung the thought from her as again and yet again it came.  People of the same blood were widely different.  To Brock and his father it had come easily to do the obvious thing, to go to Plattsburg.  It had not so come to young Hugh, but that in good time he would see his duty and do it she would not for an instant doubt.  She would not break faith with the lad in thought.  With a perfect delicacy she avoided any word that would influence him.  He knew.  All his life he had breathed loyalty.  It was she herself, reading to them night after night through years, who had taught the boys hero worship—­above all, worship of American heroes, Washington, Paul Jones, Perry, Farragut, Lee; how Dewey had said, “You may fire now, Gridley, if you are ready”; how Clark had brought the Oregon around the continent; how Scott had gone alone among angry Indians.  She had taught them such names, names which will not die while America lives.  It was she who had told the little lads, listening wide-eyed, that as these men had held life lightly for the glory of America, so her sons, if need came, must be ready to offer their lives for their country.  She remembered how Brock, his round face suddenly scarlet, had stammered out: 

“I am ready, Mummy.  I’d die this minute for—­for America.  Wouldn’t you, Hughie?”

And young Hugh, a slim, blond angel of a boy, of curly, golden hair and unexpected answers, had ducked beneath the hero, upsetting him into a hedge to his infinite anger.  “I wouldn’t die right now, Brocky,” said Hugh.  “There’s going to be chocolate cake for lunch.”

One could never count on Hugh’s ways of doing things, but Brock was a stone wall of reliability.  She smiled, thinking of his youth and beauty and entire boyishness, to think yet of the saying from the Bible which always suggested Brock, “Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.”  It was so with the lad; through the gay heart and eager interest in life pulsed an atmosphere of deep religiousness.  He was always “in perfect peace,” and his mother, less balanced, had stayed her mind on that quiet and right young mind from its very babyhood.  The lad had seen his responsibilities and lifted them all his life.  It came to her how, when her own mother, very dear to Brock, had died, she had not let the lads go with her to the house of death for fear of saddening their youth, and how, when she and their father came home from the hard, terrible business of the funeral, they met little Hugh on the drive, rapturous at seeing them again, rather