She smiled at him.  “It is because my heart is singing—­”

“Do you feel like that?”

She nodded.  “In three days the song will cease—­the lights will go out, and the curtain will fall—­the end of the world will come.”

“Drake goes in three days?”

“He goes back to camp.  I don’t expect to see him again before he sails.”

“Lucky fellow.”

“To go?”

“To have you.”

“Please don’t.”

“Let me say this—­that I acted like a cad; I’d like to feel that you’ve forgiven me.”

“I have forgotten, which is better, isn’t it?”

“How sweet you are—­and all the sweetness is Derry’s.  Well, when I go over, will you pray for me, my dear?”

He was in dead earnest.  “There are so few women—­who pray—­but I rather fancy that you must—­”

All around them was surging talk.  “How strange it seems,” Jean said, “that we should be speaking of such things, here—­”

“No,” Ralph said, “it is not strange.  I have a feeling that I shan’t come back.”

Alma Drew on the other side of him claimed his attention.  “War is the great sensational opportunity.  And there are people who like patriotism of the sound-the-trumpet-beat-the-drum variety—­”

“You said that rather cleverly, Alma,” Ralph told her, “but you mustn’t forget that was the kind of patriotism our forefathers had, and it seemed rather effective.”

“Men aren’t machines,” Jean said hotly.  “They are flesh and blood, and so are women—­a fife and drum or a bag-pipe means more to them than just crude music; the blood of their ancestors thrilled to the sound.”

“As savages thrill to a tom-tom.”

They stared at her.

“It is all savage,” Alma said, crisply and coolly, “We are all murderers.  We are teaching our men to run Germans through with bayonets, and trying to make ourselves think that they aren’t breaking the sixth commandment.  Yet in times of peace, when a man kills he goes to the electric chair—­”

It was Derry who answered that.  “If in times of peace I heard you scream and saw you set upon by thieves and murderers, and stood with my hands in my pockets while you were tortured and killed, would you call my non-interference laudable?”

“That’s different.”

“It is the same thing.  The only difference lies in the fact that thousands of defenceless women and little children are calling.  Would you have the nation stand with its hands in its pockets?”

Alma, cold as ice, challenged him:  “Why should they call to us?  We’ll be sorry some day that we went into it.”

Out of a dead silence, a man said:  “Not long ago, I went into a sweet shop in England.  A woman came in with two children.  They were rosy children and round.  They carried muffs.

“She bought candy for them—­and when she gave it to them, I saw that they had—­no hands—­”