“Then that ice-cream place’s wife,” she said, “told me about to-night—and somebody told Aunt ’Cretia. And we come here to the meeting—but when I saw you, I run and lost ’em—”
“I wanted you when I was in that meeting,” he told her, “more’n any other time, most. I knew you knew what they meant.”
She said the thing which in the tense feeling of that hour, had remained for her paramount.
“That woman,” she cried, “with her baby in her shawl! Think—when she knew it was gone—and she couldn’t go back....”
“I thought—what if it had been you,” he told her.
She was in his arms, close in the dusk of a great cedar. “Any woman—any woman!” she said, and he felt her sobbing.
He turned and looked away at the people. Not far from them, like murals on the night, went the people, that little lighted stream of people, down the white steps and along the gray drives. He looked at the women. That about the baby in the shawl might have happened to any one of them, if war were here.... It was terrible to think that this might happen to any one of these women. He felt as if he knew them. And then too, there must be some of them whose fathers had died....
He kept looking at the people, and in his arms was Lory, sobbing for that woman who had lost her child from her shawl; and over there across the water were thousands whose children were gone, whose fathers had died....