“Why, she says she hopes it will turn out to be a sweater when she gets it done; and if it is good enough she will give it to the Red Cross,” and Ethel laughed gently. “Humph!” mumbled Mrs. Clayton. “I wonder if she has a good pattern?” Thus grew the stirrings of general interest in Mailsburg in the war and in our preparations for entering it. Ethel realized amid her manifold office duties that the undercurrent of their life was becoming more strongly patriotic. It was learned that at least one Mailsburg boy was already at the front. It was true he had disappeared from town some years before, and under a cloud; but his mother had always known where he was. Now the _Clarion_ came out with a full page on Sunday, “Mailsburg’s First Boy in France.” Sergeant Willy O’Rourke of General Pershing’s forces had sent his mother several postal cards from “over there.” Here they were reproduced, with a tintype of the sergeant and a sympathetic wash-drawing of Mrs. O’Rourke--a little old woman living down by the docks who said to the reporter: “Shure an’ th’ O’Rourkes was all fighters. ’Tis no wonder Willy got over there first. Them Garmans’ll have their own troubles now.” And yet there was something in it that made the reader choke up. Macon Hammerly had his brusk comment to make: “It may be that Bill O’Rourke left town just ahead of the constable. I remember well the red-headed gossoon. He wasn’t a mite better than this Boots Skinner is now. But, by the holy poker! he’s a _man_. There’s nothing soft and sissified about Bill. If Bill dies for his country he’ll be doing something better than a whole lot of these trifling, dawdling fellows will ever arrive at.” If he dies for his country! That might be Frank Barton’s fate if he went “over there.” The thought more than once brought Ethel Clayton upright in bed at night. It sometimes wet her pillow with tears. Yet, if it was the truth that Helen Fuller’s influence had urged Barton away to the wars, Ethel was jealous of the other girl for it, and she realized the fact with shame. Affairs in the Hapwood-Diller Company offices continued much as usual for several weeks. The directors seemed to think Jim Mayberry a satisfactory substitute manager. Having the details of the business at her finger tips as she had, Ethel was quite sure that the superintendent was attending to his additional duties in an exemplary manner. Ethel checked up much of the work of the other members of the office staff, especially in the correspondence end of the business, and it was in looking over a schedule of stock to be ordered she made a discovery that puzzled her. Mayberry had now, of course, the ordering of supplies of all kinds; but there was little in the manufacturing line that Ethel Clayton did not know about. Here were certain grades of stock which she had no idea were called for by any order then on the factory’s books already contracted for.