It was spring once more. In the garden of the Byrdsnest flowering shrubs were in bloom; the beds were studded with daffodils; the scent of lilac filled the air. Birds flashed and sang, for it was May, high May, and the nests were built. Mary, warm-cheeked in the sun, and wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a pair of gardening gloves, was thinning out a clump of cornflowers. At one corner of the lawn, shaded by a flowering dog-wood, was a small sand-pit, and in this a yellow-haired two-year-old boy diligently poured sand through a wire sieve. In a white perambulator lay a pink, brown-haired, baby girl, soundly sleeping, a tiny thumb held comfortably in her mouth. Now and then Mary straightened from her task and tiptoed over to the baby, to see that she was still in the shade, or that no flies disturbed her.

Mary's face was not that of a happy woman, but it was the face of one who has found peace. It was graver than of old, but lightened whenever she looked at her children with an expression of proud tenderness. She was dressed in the simplest of white cotton gowns, beneath which the lines of her figure showed a little fuller, but strong and graceful as ever. She looked very womanly, very desirable, as she bent over the baby's carriage.

Lily emerged from the front door, and set a tea-tray upon the low porch table. She lingered for a moment, glancing with pride at the verandah with its green rocking chairs, hammock, and white creeping-rug.

“My, Mrs. Byrd, don't our new porch look nice, now it's all done?” she exclaimed, beaming.

“Yes,” said Mary, dropping into a rocking-chair to drink her tea, and throwing off her hat to loosen the warm waves of hair about her forehead, “isn't it awfully pretty? I don't know how we should have managed without it on damp mornings, now that Baby wants to crawl all the time. Ah, here is Miss Mason!” she exclaimed, smiling as that spinster, in white shirtwaist and alpaca skirt, dismounted from a smart bicycle at the gate.

“Any letters, Sparrow?”

Miss Mason, extracting several parcels from her carrier, flopped gratefully into a rocker, and drew off her gloves.

“One or two,” she said. “Here, Lily; here's your marmalade, and here's the soap, and a letter for you. There are a few bills, Mary, and a couple of notes—” she passed them across—“and here's an afternoon paper one of the Haven youngsters handed me as I passed him on the road. He called out something about another atrocity. I haven't looked at it. I hate to open the things these days.”

“I know,” nodded Mary, busy with her letters, “so do I. This is from Mr. Gunther, from California. He's been there all the winter, you know. Oh, how nice; he's coming back! Says we are to expect a visit from him soon,” Mary exclaimed, with a pleased smile. “Here's a line from Constance,” she went on. “Everything is doing splendidly in her garden, she says. She wants us all to go up in June, before she begins her auto speaking trip. Don't you think it would be nice!”

“Perfectly elegant,” said the Sparrow. “I'm glad she's taking a little rest. I thought she looked real tired this spring.”

“She works so frightfully hard.”

“Land sakes, work agrees with you, Mary! You look simply great. If your new book does as well as the old one I suppose porches won't satisfy you—you'll be wanting to build an ell on the house?”

“That's just what I do want,” said Mary, smiling. “I want to have a spare room, and proper place for the babies. We're awfully crowded. Did I tell you Mr. Farraday had some lovely plans that he had made years ago, for a wing?”

“You don't say!”

“Yes, but I'm afraid we'll have to wait another year for that, till I can increase my short story output.”

“My, it seems to me you write them like a streak.”

Mary shook her head. “No, after Baby is weaned I expect to work faster, and ever so much better.”

“Well, if you do any better than you are doing, Frances Hodgson Burnett won't be in it; that's all I can say.”

“Oh, Sparrow!” smiled Mary, “she writes real grown-up novels, too, and I can only do silly little children's things.”

“They're not silly, Mary Byrd, I can tell you that,” sniffed Miss Mason, shaking out her paper.

“My gracious!” She turned a shocked face to Mary. “What do you suppose those Germans have done now? Sunk the Lusitania!”

“The Lusitania?” exclaimed Mary, incredulously.

“Yes, my dear; torpedoed her without warning. My, ain't that terrible? It says they hope most of the passengers are saved—but they don't know yet.”

“Let me see!” Mary bent over her shoulder. “The Lusitania gone!” she whispered, awed.

“No, no!” exclaimed the Sparrow suddenly, hurrying off the porch. “Ellie not pour sand over his head! No, naughty!”

Mary sank into her chair with the paper. There was the staring black headline, but she could hardly believe it. The Lusitania gone? The great ship she knew so well, on which she and Stefan had met, gone! Lying in the ooze, with fish darting above the decks where she had walked with Stefan. Those hundreds of cabins a labyrinth for fish to lose their way in—all rotting in the black sea currents. The possible loss of life had not yet come home to her. It was inconceivable that there would not have been ample time for every one to escape. But the ship, the great English ship! So swift—so proud!

Dropping the paper, she walked slowly across the garden and the lane, and found her way to a little seat she had made on the side of the bluff overlooking the water. Here, her back to a tree trunk, she sat immobile, trying to still the turmoil of memories that rose within her.

The Lusitania gone!

It seemed like the breaking of the last link that bound her to the past. All the belief, all the wonder of that time were already gone, and now the ship, her loveship, was gone, too, lost forever to the sight of men.

She saw again its crowded decks, saw the lithe, picturesque figure of the young artist with the eager face bending over her—

“Won't you be perfectly kind, and come for a walk?”

She saw the saloon on her engagement night when she sang at the ship's concert. What were the last words she had sung?

Alas, how unconsciously prophetic she had been. Nothing had endured, neither love, nor faith, nor the great ship of their pilgrimage herself.

Other memories crowded. Their honeymoon at Shadeham, the sweet early days of their studio life, her glorious pride in his great painting of love exalted.... The night of Constance's party, when, after her singing, her husband had left his place by Miss Berber and crossed the room so eagerly to her side. Their first weeks at the Byrdsnest—how happy they had been then, and how worshipfully he had looked at her the morning their son was born. All gone. She had another baby now, but he had never seen it—never would see it, she supposed. Her memory traveled on, flitting over the dark places and lingering at every sunny peak of their marriage journey. Their week in Vermont! How they had skated and danced together; how much he seemed to love her then! Even the day he sailed for France he seemed to care for her. “Why are we parting?” he had cried, kissing her. Yes, even then their marriage, for all the clouds upon it, had seemed real—she had never doubted in her inmost heart that they were each other's.

With a stab of the old agony, Mary remembered the day she got his letter admitting his relations with Felicity. The unbelievable breakdown of her whole life! His easy, lightly made excuses. He, in whose arms she had lain a hundred times, with whom she had first learnt the sacrament of love, had given himself to another woman, had given all that most close and sacred intimacy of love, and had written, “I cannot say with truth that I regret it.” How she had lived through the reading of those words she did not know. Grief does not kill, or surely she would have died that hour. Her own strength, and the miracle of life within her, alone stayed her longing for death. It was ten months ago; she had lived down much since then, had schooled herself daily to forgetfulness; yet now again the unutterable pang swept over her—the desolation of loss, and the incapacity to believe that such loss could be.

She rebelled against the needlessness of it all now, as she had done then, in those bitter days before her little Rosamond came to half-assuage her pain.

Well, he had redeemed himself in a way. The day James Farraday came to tell her that Stefan had enlisted, some part of her load was eased. The father of her children was not all ignoble.

Mary mused on. How would it end? Would Stefan live? Should she—could she—ever see him again? She thanked God he was there, serving the country he loved. “The only thing he ever really loved, perhaps,” she thought. She supposed he would be killed—all that genius lost like so much more of value that the world was scrapping to-day—and then it would all be quite gone—

Through the trees dropped the insistent sound of a baby's cry to its mother. She rose; the heavy clouds of memory fell away. The past was gone; she lived for the future, and the future was in her children.

---

The next morning Mary had just bathed the baby, and was settling her in her carriage, when the Sparrow, who, seated on the porch with Elliston, was engaged in cutting war maps from the papers and pasting them in an enormous scrapbook, gave a warning cough.

“Here comes Mr. McEwan,” she whispered, in the hushed voice reserved by her simple type for allusions to the afflicted.

“Oh, poor dear,” said Mary, hurrying across the lawn to meet him. She felt more than ever sympathetic toward him, for Mac's wife had died in a New Hampshire sanitarium only a few weeks before, and all his hopes of mending her poor broken spirit were at an end. Reaching the gate, she gave an involuntary cry.

McEwan was stumbling toward her almost like a drunken man. His face was red, his eyes bloodshot; a morning paper trailed loosely from his hand.

“Mary,” he cried, “I came back from the station to see ye—hae ye heard, my girl?”

“Wallace!” she exclaimed, frightened, “what is it? What has happened?” She led him to a seat on the porch; he sank into it unresisting. Miss Mason pushed away her scrapbook, white-faced.

“The Lusitania! They were na' saved, Mary. There's o'er a thousand gone. O'er a hundred Americans—hundreds of women and little bairns, Mary—like yours—Canadian mithers and bairns going to be near their brave lads—babies, Mary.” And the big fellow dropped his rough head on his arms and sobbed like a child.

“Oh, Wallace; oh, Wallace!” whispered Mary, fairly wringing her hands; “it can't be! Over a thousand lost?”

“Aye,” he cried suddenly, bringing his heavy fist down with a crash on the wicker table, “they drooned them like rats—God damn their bloody souls.”

His face, crimson with rage and pity, worked uncontrollably. Mary covered her eyes with her hands. The Sparrow sat petrified. The little Elliston, terrified by their strange aspects, burst into loud wails.

“There, darling; there, mother's boy,” crooned Mary soothingly, pressing her wet cheek to his.

“Little bairns like that, Mary,” McEwan repeated brokenly. Mary gathered the child close into her arms. They sat in stunned horror.

“Weel,” said McEwan at last, more quietly. “I'll be going o'er to enlist. I would ha' gone long sine, but that me poor girl would ha' thocht I'd desairted her. She doesna' need me now, and there's eno' left for the lad. Aye, this is me call. I was ay a slow man to wrath, Mary, but now if I can but kill one German before I die—” His great fist clenched again on the table.

“Oh, don't, dear man, don't,” whispered Mary, with trembling lips, laying her cool hand over his. “You're right; you must go. But don't feel so terribly.”

His grip relaxed; his big hand lay under hers quietly.

“I could envy you, Wallace, being able to go. It's hard for us who have to stay here, just waiting. My poor sister has lost her husband already, and I don't know whether mine is alive or dead. And now you're going! Elliston's pet uncle!” She smiled at him affectionately through her tears.

“I'll write you if I hear aught about the Foreign Legion, Mary,” he said, under his breath.

She pressed his hand in gratitude. “When shall you go?” she asked.

“By the next boat.”

“Go by the American Line.”

His jaw set grimly. “Aye, I will. They shall no torpedo me till I've had ae shot at them!”

Mary rose. “Now, Wallace, you are to stay and lunch with us. You must let us make much of the latest family hero while we have him. Eh, Sparrow?”

“Yes,” nodded Miss Mason emphatically, “I've hated the British ever since the Revolution—I and my parents and my grandparents—but I guess I'm with them, and those that fight for them, from now on.”

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