absorbed in his new dog.  But Brock, then fourteen, was in the house alone, quiet, his fresh, dear face red with tears, and a black necktie of his father’s, too large for him, tied under his collar.  Of all the memories of her boys, that grotesque black tie was the most poignant and most precious.  It said much.  It said:  “I also, O, my mother, am of my people.  I have a right to their sorrows as well as to their joys, and if you do not give me my place in trouble, I shall do what I can alone, being but a boy.  I shall give up play, and I shall wear mourning as I can, not knowing how very well, but pushed by all my being to be with my own in their mourning.”

Quickly affection for the other lad asserted itself.  Brock and Hugh were different, but Hugh was a dear boy, too—­undeveloped, that was all.  He had never taken life seriously, little Hugh, and now that this war-cloud hung over the world, he simply refused to look at it; he turned away his face.  That was all, a temperament which loved harmony and shrank from ugliness; these things were young Hugh’s limitations, and no ignoble quality.

In a long dream, yet much faster than the words have told it, in comprehensive flashes of memory, her elbows on her knees and her face, in her slender hands, looking out over the garden with its arched way of roses, with its high hedge, looking past the loveliness that was home to the city pulsing in summer heat, to the shining zigzag of river beyond the city, the woman reviewed her boys’ lives.  Boys were not now merely one phase of humanity; they had suddenly become the nation.  They stood in the foreground of a world crisis; back of them America was ranged, orderly, living and moving to feed, clothe, and keep happy these millions of lads holding in their hands the fate of the earth.  Her boys were but two, yet necessary.  She owed them to the country, as other mothers of men.

There was a whistle under the archway, a flying step, and young Hugh shot from beneath the rosiness of Dorothy Perkins vines and took the stone steps in four bounds.  All the dogs fell into a community chorus of barks and whines and patterings about, and Hugh’s hands were on this one and that as he bent over the woman.

“A good kiss, Mummy; that’s cold baked potato,” he complained, and she laughed and hugged him.

“Not cold; I was just thinking.  Your knee, Hughie?  You came up like a bird.”

Hugh made a face.  “Bad break, that,” he grinned, and limped across the terrace and back.  “Mummy, it doesn’t hurt much now, and I do forget,” he explained, and his color deepened.  With that:  “Tom Arthur is waiting for me in town.  We’re going to pick up Whitney, the tennis champion, at the Crossroads Club.  May I take Dad’s roadster?”

“Yes, Hughie.  And, Hugh, meet the train, the seven-five.  Dad’s coming to-night, you know.”

The boy took her hand, looked at her uneasily.  “Mummy, dear, don’t be thinking sinful thoughts about me.  And don’t let Dad.  Hold your fire, Mummy.”