Maggie did not follow this reasoning, but she received a disagreeable, rather daunting impression from the eyes which looked at her so hard, from the stern, quivering voice. She flounced back on her pillow, saying impatiently: “I don’t know what’s got into you, Ellen Boardman. You look actually _queer_, these days! What do _you_ care so much about the Belgians for? You never heard of them before all this began! And everybody knows how immoral French people are.” Ellen turned out the gas and got into bed silently. Maggie felt uncomfortable and aggrieved. The next time she saw Mr. Wentworth she repeated the conversation to him. She hoped and expected that the young minister would immediately furnish her with a crushing argument to lay Ellen low, but instead he was silent for a moment, and then said: “That’s rather an interesting illustration, about the burglars going through your room. Where does she get such ideas?” Maggie disavowed with some heat any knowledge of the source of her cousin’s eccentricities. “I don’t _know_ where! She’s a stenographer downtown.” Mr. Wentworth looked thoughtful and walked away, evidently having forgotten Maggie. In the days which followed, the office-manager of the wholesale hardware house more and more justified the accusation of looking “queer.” It came to be so noticeable that one day her employer, Mr. Pennypacker, asked her if she didn’t feel well. “You’ve been looking sort of under the weather,” he said. She answered, “I’m just sick because the United States won’t do anything to help Belgium and France.” Mr. Pennypacker had never received a more violent shock of pure astonishment. “Great Scotland!” he ejaculated, “what’s that to you?” “Well, I live in the United States,” she advanced, as though it were an argument. Mr. Pennypacker looked at her hard. It was the same plain, serious, rather sallow face he had seen for years bent over his typewriter and his letter-files. But the eyes were different—anxious, troubled. “It makes me sick,” she repeated, “to see a great big nation picking on a little one that was only keeping its promise.” Her employer cast about for a conceivable reason for the aberration. “Any of your folks come here from there?” he ventured. “Gracious, _no!_” cried Ellen, almost as much shocked as Maggie would have been at the idea that there might be “foreigners” in her family. She added: “But you don’t have to be related to a little boy, do you, to get mad at a man that’s beating him up, especially if the boy hasn’t done anything he oughtn’t to?” Mr. Pennypacker stared. “I don’t know that I ever looked at it that way.” He added: “I’ve been so taken up with that lost shipment of nails, to tell the truth, that I haven’t read much about the war. There’s always _some_ sort of a war going on over there in Europe, seems to me.” He stared for a moment into space, and came back with a jerk to the letter he was dictating.