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"I sent for you, yes," he said. "I sent - I'll tell you why I sent for you, Jackson. I've been meaning to do it for several weeks. Now that this has come I'm more than glad I did so. You can't keep your family on what you are getting. That's certain."

"My wife is going to help me, sir. The boy will soon be weaned. Then she intends to get a position. She was a milliner when we were married."

"But - Great Scott! She ought not to leave a child as young as that."

Jackson smiled.

"She's going to fix that, all right. She wants to do it. And we're all right so far I had saved a little."

Then there were women like that! Women who would not only let their men go to war, but who would leave their homes and enter the struggle for bread, to help them do it.

"She says it's the right thing," volunteered Jackson, proudly. Women who felt that a man going into the service was a right thing. Women who saw war as a duty to be done, not a wild adventure for the adventurous.

"You ought to be very proud of her," he said slowly. "There are not many like that."

"Well," Jackson said, apologetically, "they'll come round, sir. Some of them kind of hate the idea, just at first. But I look to see a good many doing what my wife's doing."

Clayton wondered grimly what Jackson would think if he knew that at that moment he was passionately envious of him, of his uniform, of the youth that permitted him to wear that uniform, of his bronzed skin, of his wife, of his pride in that wife.

"You're a lucky chap, Jackson," he said. "I sent for you because I wanted to say that, as long as you are in the national service, I shall feel that you are on a vacation" - he smiled at the word - "on pay. Under those circumstances, I owe you quite a little money."

Jackson was too overwhelmed to reply at once.

"As a matter of fad," Clayton went on, "it's a national move, in a way. You don't owe any gratitude. We need our babies, you see. More than we do hats! If this war goes on, we shall need a good many boy babies."

And his own words suddenly crystallized the terror that was in him. It was the boys who would go; boys who whistled in the morning; boys who dreamed in the spring, long dreams of romance and of love.

Boys. Not men like himself, with their hopes and dreams behind them. Not men who had lived enough to know that only their early dreams were real. Not men, who, having lived, knew the vast disillusion of living and were ready to die.

It was only after Jackson had gone that he saw the fallacy of his own reasoning. If to live were disappointment, then to die, still dreaming the great dream, was not wholly evil. He found himself saying,

"To earn some honorable advancement for one's soul."

Deep down in him, overlaid with years of worldliness, there was a belief in a life after death. He looked out the window at the little, changing group. In each man out there there was something that would live on, after he had shed that sweating, often dirty, always weary, sometimes malformed shell that was the body. And then the thing that would count would be not how he had lived but what he had done.

This war was a big thing. It was the biggest thing in all the history of the world. There might be, perhaps, some special heaven for those who had given themselves to it, some particular honorable advancement for their souls. Already he saw Jackson as one apart, a man dedicated.

Then he knew that all his thinking was really centered about his boy. He wanted Graham to go. But in giving him he was giving him to the chance of death. Then he must hold to his belief in eternity. He must feel that, or the thing would be unbearable. For the first time in his life he gave conscious thought to Natalie's religious belief. She believed in those things. She must. She sat devoutly through the long service; she slipped, with a little rustle of soft silk, so easily to her knees. Perhaps, if he went to her with that?

CHAPTER XXXII

For a week after Anna's escape Herman Klein had sat alone and brooded. Entirely alone now, for following a stormy scene on his