Ailsa Paige. Robert W. Chambers

I'm going to business every day as though nothing was happening to the country I'm living in? I tell you now—you and mother and father—that I'm not built that way——"

      Ailsa rose in bed, snatched the paper from his grasp, and leaning on one arm gazed down at the flaring head-lines:

      THE WAR BEGUN

      Very Exciting News from Charleston

      Bombardment of Fort Sumter Commenced

      Terrible Fire from the Secessionists' Batteries

      Brilliant Defence of Maj. Anderson

      Reckless Bravery of the Confederate States Troops.

      And, scanning it to the end, cried out:

      "He hasn't hauled down his flag! What are you so excited about?"

      "I—I'm excited, of course! He can't possibly hold out with only eighty men and nothing to feed them on. Something's got to be done!" he added, walking up and down the room. "I've made fun of the militia—like everybody else—but Jimmy Lent is getting ready, and I'm doing nothing! Do you hear what I'm saying, Ailsa?"

      She looked up from the newspaper, sitting there cross-legged under the coverlet.

      "I hear you, Steve. I don't know what you mean by 'something's got to be done.' Major Anderson is doing what he can—bless him!"

      "That's all right, but the thing isn't going to stop there."

      "Stop where?"

      "At Sumter. They'll begin firing on Fortress Monroe and Pensacola—I—how do you know they're not already thinking about bombarding Washington? Virginia is going out of the Union; the entire South is out, or going. Yesterday, I didn't suppose there was any use in trying to get them back again. Father did, but I didn't. I think it's got to be done, now. And the question is, Ailsa, whose going to do it?"

      But she was fiercely absorbed again in the news, leaning close over the paper, tumbled dull-gold hair falling around her bare shoulders, breath coming faster and more irregularly as she read the incredible story and strove to comprehend its cataclysmic significance.

      "If others are going, I am," repeated her cousin sullenly.

      "Going where, Steve?—Oh———"

      She dropped the paper and looked up, startled; and he looked back at her, defiant, without a flicker in those characteristic family eyes of his, clear as azure, steady to punishment given or taken—good eyes for a boy to inherit. And he inherited them from his rebel mother.

      "Father can't keep me home if other people go," he said.

      "Wait until other people go." She reached out and laid a hand on his arm.

      "Things are happening too fast, Steve, too fast for everybody to quite understand just yet. Everybody will do what is the thing to do; the family will do what it ought to. … Has your mother seen this?"

      "Yes. Neither she nor father have dared speak about it before us—" He made a gesture of quick despair, walked to the window and back.

      "It's a terrible thing, Ailsa, to have mother feel as she does."

      "How could she feel otherwise?"

      "I've done my best to explain to her——"

      "O Steve! You!—when it's a matter between her soul and God!"

      He said, reddening: "It's a matter of common-sense—I don't mean to insult mother—but—good Lord, a nation is a nation, but a state is only a state! I—hang it all—what's the use of trying to explain what is born in one——"

      "The contrary was born in your mother, Steve. Don't ever talk to her this way. And—go out, please, I wish to dress."

      He went away, saying over his shoulders: "I only wanted to tell you that I'm not inclined to sit sucking my thumb if other men go, and you can say so to father, who has forbidden me to mention the subject to him again until I have his permission."

      But he went away to business that morning with his father, as usual; and when evening came the two men returned, anxious, dead tired, having passed most of the day standing in the dense throngs that choked every street around the bulletin boards of the newspaper offices.

      Ailsa had not been out during the day, nor had Mrs. Craig, except for an hour's drive in the family coupe around the district where preliminary surveys for the new Prospect Park were being pushed.