Ralph grumbled at the abnormal curiosity, as he called it, for horrors, and again quarreled with Patsy for cultivating the love of war among her pupils, to which Patsy hotly replied that she'd never, as long as she lived, cease to cultivate hatred of Germany and her kind of war. And then for days there would be coldness between them. Patsy would cry herself to sleep, and Ralph would go about glum and self-accusing, save now and then when he would burst into cursing at war and all its horrible effects. "If it wasn't for the war, I'd have friends in Sabinsport," he told Dick. If there was no one else in Sabinsport by the summer of 1916 to whom the war had brought the same anguish as to Katie Flaherty, there was a constantly larger number to whom it was bringing dread and pain. The war--this war which did not concern them, continued to reach its long and cruel tentacles across the sea and every now and then literally lift a member from some apparently somnolent family. There was Young Tom, as all Sabinsport called the eighteen-year-old son of Tom and Mary Sabins. Young Tom had come home from school in the fall of 1915 and announced that he had volunteered for ambulance service in France, and that if they didn't do the square thing and let him go, he'd run away. And they knew he would do it. Tom took it squarely and with inward pride, but Mary Sabins' world toppled on its foundations when she heard his ultimatum and realized that for some reason unknown to herself her husband actually sympathized with the boy. "But why? Why? It's not your country. You have no right to go. You're my son. I will not consent." "Mother," said Young Tom, with the cruel finality of youth that nothing but its own wish moves, "I'm going. This is the biggest scrap the world ever saw, and you needn't think I'm going to miss it." "But wait--wait until you're twenty-one," she urged. "You must finish college. You might be killed." "Sure, I might--but I won't be. If I wait I'll miss it. It will be over. Can't you understand, Mother, why a fellow wants to get into the big things? And then, darn it, Mother, haven't you any feeling for France? Why, France helped us when we were up against it, and we owe her one." But to Mary Sabins the appeal was empty. It reached neither her mind nor her heart. Young Tom was part of _her_ world--her own private affair. What right had the war to touch it? What could ail him that he should do this mad thing? She had all her plans made for him--they had money to carry them out. This spoiled everything.