She lifted her face, and her eyes were the eyes of faith he had known all his life.  “You blessed boy of mine, I will hold my fire.”  And then Hugh had all but knocked her over with a violent kiss again, and he slammed happily through the screen doors and was leaping up the stairs.  Ten minutes later she heard the car purring down the drive.

The dogs settled about her with long dog-sighs again.  She looked at her wrist—­only five-thirty.  She went back with a new unrest to her thoughts.  Hugh’s knee—­it was odd; it had lasted a long time, ever since—­she shuddered a bit, so that old Mavourneen lifted her head and objected softly—­ever since war was declared.  Over a year!  To be sure, he had hurt it again badly, slipping on the ice in December, just as it was getting strong.  She wished that his father would not be so grim when Hugh’s bad knee was mentioned.  What did he mean?  Did he dare to think her boy—­the word was difficult even mentally—­a slacker?  With that her mind raced back to the days just before Hugh had hurt this knee.  It was in February that Germany had proclaimed the oceans closed except along German paths, at German times.  “This is war at last,” her husband had said, and she knew the inevitable had come.

Night after night she had lain awake facing it, sometimes breaking down utterly and shaking her soul out in sobs, sometimes trying to see ways around the horror, trying to believe that war must end before our troops could get ready, often with higher courage glorying that she might give so much for country and humanity.  Then, in the nights, things that she had read far back, unrealizing, rose and confronted her with awful reality.  Brutalities, atrocities, wounds, barbarous captivity—­nightmares which the Germans had dug out of the grave of savagery and sent stalking over the earth—­such rose and stood before the woman lying awake night after night.  At first her soul hid its face in terror at the gruesome thoughts; at first her mind turned and fled and refused to believe.  Her boys, Brock and Hugh!  It was not credible, it was not reasonable, it was out of drawing that her good boys, her precious boys trained to be happy and help the world, to live useful, peaceful lives, should be snatched from home, here in America, and pitched into the ghastly struggle of Europe.  Push back the ocean as she might, the ocean surged every day nearer.

Daytimes she was as brave as the best.  She could say:  “If we had done it the day after the Lusitania, that would have been right.  It would have been all over now.”  She could say:  “My boys?  They will do their duty like other women’s boys.”  But nights, when she crept into bed and the things she had read of Belgium, of Serbia, came and stood about her, she knew that hers were the only boys in the world who could not, could not be spared.  Brock and Hugh!  It seemed as if it would be apparent to the dullest that Brock and Hugh were different