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the baby-faced boy dying in a German hospital haunted Campton's nights. If it were not the portrait of Benny Upsher it was at least that of hundreds and thousands of lads like him, who were thus groping and agonizing and stretching out vain hands, while in Mrs. Talkett's drawing-room well-fed men and expensive women heroically "forgot the war." Campton, seeking to expiate his own brief forgetfulness by a passion of renewed activity, announced to Boylston the next afternoon that he was coming back to the office.

Boylston hardly responded: he looked up from his desk with a face so strange that Campton broke off to cry out: "What's happened?"

The young man held out a newspaper. "They've done it—they've done it!" he shouted. Across the page the name of the Lusitania blazed out like the writing on the wall.

The Berserker light on Boylston's placid features transformed him into an avenging cherub. "Ah, now we're in it—we're in it at last!" he exulted, as if the horror of the catastrophe were already swallowed up in its result. The two looked at each other without further words; but the older man's first thought had been for his son. Now, indeed, America was "in it": the gross tangible proof for which her government had forced her to wait was there in all its unimagined horror. Cant and cowardice in high places had drugged and stupefied her into the strange belief that she was too