"Oh," said the woman, sagely, "I know. I know it like I wuz your mother. You don't have to tell me things. I know you like I do the weather. You ain't been the same since the dirty Germans did up poor little Belgium. I know the only reason you don't go is that you wouldn't live a day." "Nonsense, Katie. Where'd you get that?" "Mikey told me. He was that cut up because you couldn't go, but he needn't have run away from his poor old mother like this. I'd let him go for you. I'm no coward. It ain't his goin'; it's his thinkin' I wouldn't let him. He's always beatin' up somebody--might as well be Germans. God pity 'em when Mikey gets there. He'll wipe up the road with 'em. And don't you be worryin', Mr. Dick. I'll stand it. He can write me, can't he?" "Katie, I won't allow this. Mikey must come back. I'll go to Canada and have a search made for him. I have friends who'll find him." "Indade and you won't do anything of the kind. Would you break the by's heart--and me that proud of him? Where's the other by in Sabinsport that had the right to get up and go? Let him fight. I'll live to see him with the stripe on his sleeve--as grand as the grandest. You'll not raise a finger. Drink your coffee now, and don't mind me, old fool that I am to be makin' you worry for a little thing like that." And so Dick, with one eye on Katie's furtive wiping of her eyes, drank his coffee, wondering as he did it at the amazing intuition that affection gives. Katie and Mikey had discerned--so he told himself--what nobody in Sabinsport but Ralph knew, and he had said enough to Ralph to explain his understanding. What was it that ran from soul to soul and opened to the unlettered what was closed to the most highly trained, he asked himself. But they are Irish, and the Irish have a sixth sense--one that looks into hearts. But it was not divination, it was simply the keen and affectionate eye of Katie on him through all those terrible August and September days at the beginning. She saw what Dick did not realize, the beaten stoop to his shoulder, the despairing look in his eye when he came back from his effort to enlist. Many was the night during the days of that first approach to Paris that Katie had gone home to tell Mikey, "He's dyin' of grief, he is. He looks at his paper in the morning and drops his head in his hands and groans. He don't eat and he don't talk. The big battle is killin' him. I peeps in now and then to his study and he is sittin' lifeless like, thinkin' and thinkin'. Mikey, he's dyin' for love of France, could you beat it?" And Mikey, much perplexed, watched his hero and took excruciating pains to keep the brakes on himself, not to do anything to worry Mr. Dick. When the battle was over and the Germans turned back, Dick's joy was so great that Katie herself began to rejoice. For Katie Flaherty, the war dated from that first week of September, 1914. Also from then dated what was to become the dominating passion of her life--her hatred of Germany.