Then from the nursery above, her smallest boy was heard to cry.  With a little sigh of weariness, quickly she rose and went upstairs, and a few moments later to Roger’s ears came a low, sweet, soothing lullaby.  Years ago Edith had asked him to teach her some of his mother’s cradle songs.  And the one which she was singing to-night was a song he had heard when he was small, when the mountain storms had shrieked and beat upon the rattling old house and he had been frightened and had cried out and his mother had come to his bed in the dark.  He felt as though she were near him now.  And as he listened to the song, from the deep well of sentiment which was a part of Roger Gale rose memories that changed his mood, and with it his sense of proportions.

Here was motherhood of the genuine kind, not orating in Cooper Union in the name of every child in New York, but crooning low and tenderly, soothing one little child to sleep, one of the five she herself had borne, in agony, without complaint.  How Edith had slaved and sacrificed, how bravely she had rallied after the death of her husband.  He remembered her a few hours ago on the bed upstairs, spent and in anguish, sobbing, alone.  And remorse came over him.  Deborah’s talk at dinner had twisted his thinking, he told himself.  Well, that was Deborah’s way of life.  She had her enormous family and Edith had her small one, and in this hell of misery which war was spreading over the earth each mother was up in arms for her brood.  And, by George, of the two he didn’t know but that he preferred his own flesh and blood.  All very noble, Miss Deborah, and very dramatic, to open your arms to all the children under the moon and get your name in the papers.  But there was something pretty fine in just sitting at home and singing to one.

“All right, little mother, you go straight ahead.  This is war and panic and hard times.  You’re perfectly right to look after your own.”

He would show Edith he did not begrudge her this use of her small property.  And more than that, he would do what he could to take her out of her loneliness.  How about reading aloud to her?  He had been a capital reader, during Judith’s lifetime, for he had always enjoyed it so.  Roger rose and went to his shelves and began to look over the volumes there.  Perhaps a book of travel....  Stoddard’s “Lectures on Japan.”

Meanwhile Edith came into the room, sat down and took up her sewing.  As she did so he turned and glanced at her, and she smiled brightly back at him.  Yes, he thought with a genial glow, from this night on he would do his part.  He came back to his chair with a book in his hand, prepared to start on his new course.

“Father,” she said quietly.  Her eyes were on the work in her lap.

“Yes, my child, what is it?”

“It’s about John,” she answered.  And with a movement of alarm he looked at his daughter intently.

“What’s the matter with John?” he inquired.