Just then her ear was caught by something Molly was saying to her cousin.
“Is it true, Steve, that they have passed a law forbidding Germans to come near the water-fronts?”
“Quite true, and a very good thing, too,” young Cranston answered. “It’s about time we began to look after things a little better in this country. We have been altogether too lenient. I don’t suppose people have any idea of the amount of spy work that has been going on right under our very noses.”
Gretel remembered what her brother had told her, and, for some unaccountable reason, her heart began to beat rather uncomfortably fast. It was foolish, of course, but somehow she couldn’t help being almost glad she had not been able to keep that appointment with Fräulein.
After dinner they all went out on the piazza and watched the lights in the harbor until some one proposed to sail up the river in the motor-boat. The suggestion was eagerly accepted, and in less than ten minutes the whole party, with the exception of Mrs. Chester, who was tired, and Frank, who, being only eleven, was still considered too young to be up after nine o’clock, were gliding up the river in the Chesters’ comfortable launch.
“This is the Thames, where they have the big Harvard-Yale boat-race every June,” Molly told Gretel. “There won’t be any race this year, though, on account of the war. Steve was on the Harvard crew last year, and it was tremendously exciting.”
Gretel could not repress a sigh. Those boys seemed so young, so much, more fitted for college boat-races than for the grim work of war.
“Were you sorry to leave college?” she asked Stephen, impulsively.
“Sorry!” cried the young man; “you bet I wasn’t sorry. I’ve been wild to get into this war ever since the invasion of Belgium. It’s about time we Americans did something to lick the Germans.”
“Take care what you say, Steve,” warned his friend from the opposite seat. “Miss Schiller may not care to hear about licking Germans.”