"I don't think people have very much appetite to-day and yesterday," she
said, with the hint of a sad laugh, "all over America."

"No; I guess that's so."

"It's too terrible!" she said. "I can't sit and eat when I think of the
_Lusitania_--of all those poor, poor people strangling in the water--"

"No; I guess nobody can eat much, if they think about that."

"And of what it's going to bring, if we let it," she went on. "As if
this killing weren't enough, we want to add _our_ killing! Oh, that's
the most terrible thing of all--the thing it makes within us! Don't you
understand?"

She turned to him appealingly, and he felt queerer than ever. Dusk had
fallen. Where they stood, under the young-leaved maple tree, there
was but a faint lingering of afterglow, and in this mystery her face
glimmered wan and sweet; so that Ramsey, just then, was like one who
discovers an old pan, used in the kitchen, to be made of chased silver.

"Well, I don't feel much like dinner right now," he said. "We--we could
sit here awhile on this bench, prob'ly."





Chapter XV