She tossed out her hands.  “Slacker!  Don’t dare say it of my boy!”

The hideous word followed her.  That night, when she lay in bed and looked out into the moonlit wood, and saw the pines swaying like giant fans across a pulsing, pale sky, and listened to the summer wind blowing through the tall heads of them, again through the peace of it the word stabbed.  A slacker!  She set to work to fancy how it would be if Brock and Hugh both went to war and were both killed.  She faced the thought.  Life—­years of it—­without Brock and Hugh!  She registered that steadily in her mind.  Then she painted to herself another picture, Brock and Hugh not going to war, at home ignominiously safe.  Other women’s sons marching out into the danger—­men, heroes!  Brock and Hugh explaining, steadily explaining why they had not gone!  Brock and Hugh after the war, mature men, meeting returning soldiers, old friends who had borne the burden and heat, themselves with no memories of hideous, infinitely precious days, of hardships, and squalid trench life, and deadly pain—­for America!  Brock and Hugh going on through life into old age ashamed to hold up their heads and look their comrades in the eye!  Or else—­it might be—­Brock and Hugh lying next year, this year, in unknown, honored graves in France!  Which was worse?  And the aching heart of the woman did not wait to answer.  Better a thousand times brave death than a coward’s life.  She would choose so if she knew certainly that she sent them both to death.  The education of the war, the new glory of patriotism, had already gone far in this one woman.

And then the thought stabbed again—­a slacker—­Hugh!  How did his father dare say it?  A poisonous terror, colder than the fear of death, crawled into her soul and hid there.  Was it possible that Hugh, brilliant, buoyant, temperamental Hugh was—­that?  The days went on, and the cold, vile thing stayed coiled in her soul.  It was on the very day war was declared that young Hugh injured his knee, a bad injury.  When he was carried home, when the doctor cut away his clothes and bent over the swollen leg and said wise things about the “bursa,” the boy’s eyes were hard to meet.  They constantly sought hers with a look questioning and anxious.  Words were impossible, but she tried to make her glance and manner say:  “I trust you.  Not for worlds would I believe you did it on purpose.”

And finally the lad caught her hand and with his mouth against it spoke. “You know I didn’t do it on purpose, Mummy.”

And the cold horror fled out of her heart, and a great relief flooded her.