The brief time her father was with her in the country, Lois escaped her friends. The pair played and chatted together: occasionally, she read him a story from one of the magazines or faced him over a card-table. And these activities, in which David joined on his own brief sojourn from work, went on without the interest, almost without the notice of Muriel and Mrs. Deane. Summer to them meant merely a transfer from the City of the business and paraphernalia of City life. “A change of air” was what they said, and what they actually meant. They were sure to go where the greatest number of their friends went also. Such activities and such relations as the summer brought of itself they disqualified before the more serious continuance of City social life. Of course Lois could not be spared: but she was far less tolerant with the free toss of the greenland and the glint of a lake to formulate her appetite for somewhat else. There seemed less excuse for her dapper friends and the conventions of pleasure, under the stars and out in the open breezes. Lois could not know that these enhanced her feeling for herself: that it was against this feeling the world so painfully grated. The indifference of Muriel and Mrs. Deane was a delicious pretext for defiance. Not the least charm for Mr. Deane’s spirited revival was this half-sheepish, half-crude flaunting of revolt into the proper faces of his wife and daughter. It was as if he said: “I have my own way of taking a vacation. You think it foolish. Doubtless it is. But it _is_ a vacation.” Now, in this climax of ease and pleasure, something spiteful had to commence to stir in David, to spoil it all. Something that came with a new burst of feeling for Lois, with a new glow of comfort in this family that was so glad to have him. There was no doubt of that. His aunt’s note of a year ago had invited him to the house “until you find a comfortable and proper place for yourself in the City.” By Spring he knew that they had put aside all thoughts of his leaving, and that his uncle had no doubts of his being able to “do” downtown. The Spanish war burst, half frolic, half business, upon the country. In February the battleship “Maine” went down in Havana harbor. In March, the Inquiry Commission backed the voices of papers and politicians shrilling for war, by its dubious decision that an outside mine had done the damage. Congress turned its trick of political revolution. President McKinley was swept from the saddle. His reservations were set at naught: his reluctances were negated to weakness. In April came the call for volunteers.