"I'm sure to get my hair mussed up if I do anything but talk to Mother after I brush it for dinner," Roger was in the habit of explaining, "so it suits me just to stare at the fire."

He was sitting now on the floor beside her with his head leaning against the arm of her chair. Dicky was occupying the Morris chair with her, and the three girls were in comfortable positions, the Ethels on the sofa and Helen knitting a scarf as she sat on a footstool before the blaze.

"You're not trying your eyes knitting in this imperfect light?" asked her mother.

"This is plain sailing, Mother. I can rush along on this straight piece almost as fast as Mrs. Hindenburg, and I don't have to look on at all unless a horrid fear seizes me that I've skipped a stitch."

"Which I hope you haven't done."

"Never really but there have been several false alarms."

"How is FrÄulein?"

"All right, I guess."

"Did you see her to-day?"

"We had German compo to-day. I didn't do much with it."

"Why not?"

"It didn't seem to go off well. I don't know why. Perhaps I didn't try as hard as usual."

"Did it disturb FrÄulein?"

"Did what disturb FrÄulein?"

"That you didn't do your lesson well."

"Disturb FrÄulein? I don't know. Why should it disturb her? I should think I was the one to be disturbed."

"Were you?"

"Was I disturbed? Well, no, Mother, to tell the truth I didn't care much. That old German is so hard and the words all break up so foolishly—somehow it didn't seem very important to me this morning. And Fanny Shrewsbury said something awfully funny about it under her breath and we got laughing and—no, I wasn't especially disturbed."

"Although you had a poor lesson and didn't try to make up for it by paying strict attention in the class!"

"Why, Mother, I, er—"

Helen stopped knitting.

"You think I'm taking too seriously a poor lesson that wasn't very bad, after all? Possibly I am, but I've been noticing that all of you are more careless lately than I want my girls and boys to be."

Mrs. Morton stroked Roger's hair and looked around at the handsome young faces illuminated by the firelight.

"You mean us, too?" cried the Ethels, sitting up straight upon the sofa.

"You, too."

"We haven't meant to be careless, Mother," said Roger soberly. His mother's good opinion was something he was proud of keeping and she was so fair in her judgments that he felt that he must meet any accusations like the present in the honest spirit in which they were made.

"Do you want to know what I think is the trouble with all of you?"

Every one of them cried out for information, even Dicky, whose "Yeth" rang out above the others.

"If you ask for my candid opinion," responded Mrs. Morton, "I think you are giving so much time and attention to the work of the U. S. C. that you aren't paying proper attention to the small matters of every day life that we must all meet."

"Oh, but, Mother, you approve of the U. S. C."

"Certainly I approve of it. I think it is fine in every way; but I don't believe in your becoming so absorbed in it that you forget your daily duties. Aunt Louise had to telephone to Roger to go over and start her furnace for her yesterday when the sharp snap came, and the Ethels have been rushing off in the morning without doing the small things to help Mary that are a part of their day's work."

"Oh, Mother, they're such little things! She can do them easily once in a while."

"Any one of your morning tasks is a small matter, but when none of them are done they mount up to a good deal for Mary. If there were some real necessity for making an extra bed Mary would do it without complaining, but when, as happened yesterday morning, neither of you Ethels made your bed, and Roger left towels thrown all over his floor, and not one of Helen's bureau drawers was shut tight, and Dicky upset a box of beads and went off to kindergarten without picking them up—don't you see that what meant but a few minutes' work for each one of you meant an hour's work for one person?"

"I'll bet Mary didn't mind," growled Roger.

"Mary is too loyal to say anything, but if your present careless habits should continue we should have to have an extra maid to wait on you, and you know very well that that is impossible."

"I'm sorry, Mother," said Roger penitently. "I'm sorry about the towels and about Aunt Louise and I'm sorry I growled. You're right, of course."

"I rather guess we've been led astray by being so successful with our team work in the club," said Helen thoughtfully. "We've found out that we can do all sorts of things well if we pull together and we've been forgetting to apply co-operation at home."

"Exactly," agreed Mrs. Morton. "And you've been so absorbed in the needs of people several thousand miles away that you overlook the needs of people beside you. What you've been doing to Mary is unkind; what Helen did to FrÄulein this morning was unkind."

"Oh, Mother! I wouldn't be unkind to FrÄulein for the world."

"I don't believe you would if you thought about it. She certainly is in such sore trouble that she needs all the consideration that her scholars can give her, yet you must have annoyed her greatly this morning."

"I'm afraid FrÄulein's used to our not knowing our lessons very well," observed Roger.

"I'm sorry to hear that, but if you know you aren't doing as well as you ought to with your lessons that is the best reason in the world for you to pay the strictest attention while you are in class. Yet Helen says that she and Fanny Shrewsbury were laughing. I'm afraid FrÄulein isn't feeling especially content with her work this afternoon."

"Mother, you make me feel like a hound dog," cried Helen. "And I've been talking as if I were so sorry for FrÄulein!"

"You are sorry for her as the heroine of a romance, because her betrothed is in the army and she doesn't know where he is or whether he is alive. It sounds like a story in a book. But when you think what that would mean if it were you that had to endure the suffering it wouldn't seem romantic. Suppose Father were fighting in Mexico and we hadn't heard from him for a month—do you think you could throw off your anxiety for a minute? Don't you think you'd have to be careful every instant in school to control yourself? Don't you think it would be pretty hard if some one in school constantly did things that irritated you—didn't know her lessons and then laughed and giggled all through the recitation hour?"

Helen's and Roger's heads were bent.

"Imagine," Mrs. Morton went on, "how you would feel every day when you came home, wondering all the way whether a letter had come; wondering whether, if one had come, it would be from Father or from some one else saying that Father was—wounded."

"Oh, Mother, I can't—" Helen was almost crying.

"You can't bear to think of it; yet—"

"Yet FrÄulein was just so anxious and—"

"And we made things worse for her!"

"I know you didn't think—"

"We ought to think. I've excused myself all my life by saying 'I didn't think.' I ought to think."

"'I didn't think' explains, but it doesn't excuse."

"Nothing excuses meanness."

"That's true."

"And it's almost as mean not to see when people are in trouble as it is to see it and not to care."

"I'm glad you're teaching us to be observant, Aunt Marion," said Ethel Blue quietly. "I used to think it was sort of distinguished to be absent-minded and not to pay attention to people, but now I think it's just stupidity."

"Mother," said Roger, sitting up straight, "I've been a beast. Poor FrÄulein is worrying herself to pieces every minute of the day and I never thought anything about it. And I let Aunt Louise freeze yesterday morning and Dorothy had to go to school before the house was warmed up and she had a cold to-day because she got chilled. I see your point, and I'm a reformed pirate from this minute!"

Roger rose and squared his shoulders and walked about the room.

"When you think it out it's little things that are hard to manage all the time," he went on thoughtfully. "Here are these little things that we've been pestering Mary about, and when we kids squabble it's almost always about some trifle."

"A pin prick is often more trying than a severe wound," agreed his mother. "You brace yourself to bear a real hurt, but it doesn't seem worth while for a trifle and so you whine about it before you think. If Father and Uncle Richard really were in action all of us would do our best to be brave about it and to bear our trouble uncomplainingly—"

"The way FrÄulein does," murmured Helen.

"That's the way when you have a sickness," said Ethel Brown. "When I had the measles you and Mary said I didn't make much fuss, but every time I catch cold I'm afraid all of you hear about it."

"We do," agreed Roger cheerfully.

"I should say, then," remarked Mrs. Morton as Mary appeared at the door to announce dinner, "that this club should bear in mind that it is to serve not only those at a distance but those near home, and not only to serve people in deepest trouble but to serve by preventing suffering."

"I get you, Mother dear," said Roger, taking his father's seat.

"Prevention is a great modern principle that we don't think enough about," said Mrs. Morton.

"I know what you mean—fire prevention," exclaimed Ethel Blue. "Tom Watkins was telling us the other day about the Fire Prevention parade they had in New York. There were a lot of engines and hose wagons and ladder wagons and they were all covered with cards telling how much wiser it was to prevent fire than to let it start and then try to put it out."

"Della saw the parade," said Ethel Brown. "She told me there were signs that said 'It's cheaper to put a sprinkler in your factory than to rebuild the factory'; and 'One cigarette in a factory may cost thousands of dollars in repairs.'"

"The doctors have been working to prevent disease," said Roger. "James has often told me what his father is doing to teach people how to avoid being sick."

"All these clean-up campaigns are really for the prevention of illness as much as the making of cleanliness," said Mrs. Morton.

"Everything of that sort educates people, and we can apply the same methods to our own lives," advised Mrs. Morton. "Why can't we have a household campaign to prevent giving Mary unnecessary work and to avoid irritating each other?"

"All that can be worked in as part of the duties of the Service Club," said Ethel Blue.

"Certainly it can. What's the matter, Ethel Brown?"

Ethel Brown was on the point of tears.

"One of the girls at school gave me an order for cookies the other day," she said, "and I didn't do them because we went over to the Hancocks' that afternoon."

"You got your own punishment there," remarked Roger. "If you didn't fill the order you didn't get any pay."

"That wasn't all. She was going to take them to a cousin of hers who was just getting over the mumps. She wanted to surprise her. She was awfully mad because I didn't make them. She said she had depended on them and she didn't have anything to take to her cousin."

"There you see it," exclaimed Mrs. Morton. "It didn't seem much to Ethel Brown not to make two or three dozen cookies, but in the first place she broke her promise, and in the next place she caused real unhappiness to a girl who was depending on them to give pleasure to her sick cousin."

"You've given us a shake-up we won't forget soon, Mother," remarked Roger. "There's one duty I haven't done this week that you haven't mentioned, but I'm pretty sure you know it so I might as well bring it into the light myself and say I'm sorry."

"What is it?" laughed his mother.

"I haven't been over to see Grandfather and Grandmother Emerson for ten days."

"They'll be sorry."

"I was relying on one of the girls going."

"We haven't been," confessed the Ethels.

"Nor I," admitted Helen.

Mrs. Morton looked serious.

"We love to go there," said Ethel Brown, "but we've been so busy."

"Too busy to be kind to the people near at hand, eh?"

The young people looked ruefully at one another.

"Anyway, watch me be attentive to FrÄulein," promised Helen.

She was. She and Roger made a point of giving her as little trouble as possible; and of paying her unobtrusive attentions. Roger carried home for her a huge bundle of exercises; the Ethels left some chestnuts at her door when they came back from a hunt on the hillside, and even Dicky wove her a mat at kindergarten of red and white and black paper—the German colors.

The Mortons were all attention to James, too. Every day they remembered to call him up on the telephone and ask him how his box-making was coming on. He had a telephone extension on the table at his elbow and these daily talks cheered him greatly. The others were leaving the making of most of the pasted articles to him, and they were going on with the manufacture of baskets and leather and brass and copper articles and of odds and ends of various kinds.

"Perhaps I'll be able to get up to Dorothy's next Saturday," James phoned to Roger one day, "if Mrs. Smith wouldn't mind the Club meeting downstairs. I suppose the Pater wouldn't let me try to climb to the attic yet."

Mrs. Smith was delighted to make the change for James's benefit, but before the day came he called up Roger one afternoon in great excitement.

"When did you say those church movies were?" he asked.

"To-morrow evening."

"Father says he'll take me over if he doesn't have a hurry call at the last minute."

Roger gave a whoop that resounded along the wire.

"You'll find the whole Club drawn up at the door of the schoolhouse to meet you," he cried. "The Watkinses are coming out from New York. Will Margaret come with you?"

"She and Mother will go over in the trolley."

As Roger had promised, the Club was drawn up in double ranks before the door when Doctor Hancock stopped his machine close to the step. Roger and Tom ran down to make a chair on which to carry James inside, and Helen and Dorothy were ready with the wheel-chair belonging to the old lady at the Home who had been glad to lend it for the evening to the boy whose acquaintance she had made at the Club entertainment.

James was rather embarrassed at being so conspicuous, but all his Rosemont acquaintances came to speak to him and he was quite the hero of the occasion.

The moving pictures were an innovation in Rosemont. There had been various picture shows in empty stores in the town and they had not all been of a character approved by the parents of the school children who went to them in great numbers. The rooms were dark and there was danger of fire and the pictures themselves were not always suitable for young people to see or agreeable for their elders. The result of a conference among some of the townspeople who had the interests of the place at heart was this entertainment which was the first of a series to be given in the school hall on Friday evenings all through the winter. The films were chosen by a sub-committee and it was hoped that they would be so liked that the poor places down town would find it unprofitable to continue.

The program was pleasantly varied. The story of a country boy who went to New York to make his fortune and who found out that, as in the Oriental story, his fortune lay buried in his own dooryard—in this case in the printing office of his own town—was the opener.

That was followed by a remarkable film showing the habits of swallows and by another whereon some of the flowers of Burbank's garden waved softly in the California breeze.

A dramatization of Daudet's famous story called "The Last Class" brought tears to the eyes of the onlookers whose thoughts were much across the Atlantic.

It was a simple, touching tale, and it served appropriately as the forerunner of the war pictures that had just been sent to America by photographers in Germany and France and Belgium.

The first showed troops leaving Berlin, flags flying, bands playing, while the crowds along the street waved a cheerful parting, though once in a while a woman bent her head behind her neighbor's shoulder to hide her tears.

There were scenes in Belgium—houses shattered by the bombs of airmen, huge holes dug by exploding shells; wounded soldiers making their way toward the hospitals, those with bandaged heads and arms helping those whose staggering feet could hardly carry them.

It was a serious crowd that followed every movement that passed on the screen before their eyes. The silence was deep.

Then came a hospital scene. Rows upon rows of beds ran from the front of the picture almost out of sight. Down the space between them came the doctors, instruments in hand, and behind them the nurses, the red crosses gleaming on their arm bands.

A stir went through the onlookers.

"It looks like her."

"I believe it is."

"Don't you think so? The one on the right?"

"It is—it's Mademoiselle Millerand!" cried Roger clearly.

The operator, hearing the noise in front of his booth, and all unconscious that he was showing a friend to these townspeople where the pretty young French teacher had lived for two years, almost stopped turning his machine. So slowly it went that there was no doubt among any who had known her. She followed the physician to the bed nearest the front. There they stopped and the doctor turned to Mademoiselle and asked some question. She was ready with bandages. An orderly slipped his arm under the soldier's pillow and raised his head. His eyes were closed and his face was deathly white. The doctor shook his head. Evidently he would not attempt an operation upon so ill a man. He signed to the attendant to lay the man down and as he did so the people in Rosemont, far, far away from the Belgian hospital, heard a piercing shriek.

"Mein Verlobt! My betrothed!" screamed FrÄulein Hindenburg.

"That's Schuler."

"Don't you recognize Schuler?"

"No wonder poor FrÄulein screamed!"

Kind hands were helping FrÄulein and her mother from the hall. Doctor Hancock went out with them to give a restorative to the young woman and to take them home in his car.

"Didn't he die at that very moment, Herr Doctor?" whispered FrÄulein, and the doctor was obliged to confess that it seemed so.

"But we can't be sure," he insisted.

FrÄulein's agitation put an end to the entertainment for that evening. Indeed, the film was almost exhausted when the bitter sight came to her. The people filed out seriously.

"If that poor girl has been in doubt about her betrothed, now she knows," one said to another.

"Do you think he really died?" James asked his father as they were driving home.

"I'm afraid he did, son. But there is just a chance that he didn't because the film changed just there to another scene so you couldn't tell."

"That might have been because they didn't want to show a death scene."

"I'm afraid it was."