dizzying circles and I grasped the table to steady myself. Jack! Jack going?

"Oh, Helen!" I cried, wholly unnerved. "He can't go! He's too young. My God, it never occurred to me! Why, he's only a boy! I'll go to Washington-see Wilson. It would be a crime!

I sank down at the table and put my face in my hands. Then I heard my wife's voice saying:

"John, dear, it's all right-it's simply splendid! Of course it's a surprise; but you-you wouldn't have it otherwise! It's where he ought to be! We should be the proudest people in New York. Our boy is going among the very first to fight to make the world safe for democracy, for Christian ideals; so that there never can be such an awful, awful war again; andand-and- Oh, John! John! I can't bear it!"

She threw herself down beside me and held me tight. We sat there clinging to each other for some time. Then Helen raised her head and wiped her

eyes.

"John, dear,” she said, "let's go up to the house. I'll leave word for Margery at the office. I can't think in this place. I want to have my own things round me my own books and pictures and furniture -not all this gilt and plush! I don't feel as if I were all here at this hotel. I'm sure we can talk things over better there than in this horrible suite!"

I paid my bill to the dapper young gentleman at the hotel office, who seemed rather surprised at our sudden change of plans and who "trusted that everything had been satisfactory"; stated that I would send for my baggage that evening, helped Helen into a taxi, and started for Seventy-second Street. It was a lovely afternoon, sunlight everywhere, children playing with their nurses in Park Avenue, the streets clean and quiet; nothing seemed changed since we had gone away. As we turned into our own block Helen leaned out of the window of the taxi and looked up at the house.

"How nice!" she exclaimed. "Some one has hung out a big American flag! It must have been Henry!"

Sure enough, there over our white Colonial doorway, the pole suspended from the iron grill of the library windows, curling and uncurling in the soft afternoon breeze, floated the Stars and Stripes.

"Splendid!" I answered. "It was bully of your brother to do that."

Then my eye caught another and smaller flag beneath a red flag enclosing an oblong field of white upon which was a single star of blue.

"Hello!" I cried. "What do you suppose that is? Do you see that other flag, Helen?"

"Why, yes!" she answered curiously. "I wonder what it can mean!"

The decrepit taxi-driver touched his hat.

"Pardon me, ma'am," he said. "That blue star means that some one from this house has gone to the front. God bless him, whoever he is!"

We looked at each other in silence.

"God bless him," I repeated, though my lips quivered, "whoever he is!"

How familiar, yet how strange, seemed the silent interior of our house, with its shrouded furniture, its shadowy corners, its drawn curtains. For the first time I realized what it meant to me-to Helen-to

all of us. There was the room where Margery had been born. There was Jack's half workshop, half stateroom, with that yellow Teddy-bear he had never quite brought himself to relinquish, sitting astride the football he had forced across the St. Mark's goalline for a victory for Groton.

I closed the door quickly lest Helen should see it. Yet I felt that it was best that we should give up our home; best to surrender it to the unsympathetic hands of strangers than not to do our bit in teaching the rest of the nation the lesson of economy. At any price -however seemingly extravagant-a hotel would be cheaper than housekeeping.

"Well," I said finally when, after our inspection, we had gone down-stairs into the library and thrown open the windows to the afternoon sun, "it's tough, but we'll have to give it up!"

"Isn't there anything else we could do first?"

asked my wife. "I would do almost anything rather than lose my home!"

"The only way to really save any substantial sum of money is to make a radical change in our mode of life," I answered. "You would find it almost impossible to give up living here as you have always lived. Let's do the thing right and start differently."

Helen made no further protest, except to give a little sigh as she glanced at the portraits of my father and mother, which hung on either side of the fireplace. "All right, dear," she agreed. "If we must, that is all there is to it."

There was, however, one factor in the situation upon which it appeared that we had not sufficiently reckoned. It had never occurred to me that we should have any difficulty about leasing our house if we cared to do so; but a brief colloquy over the telephone with our real-estate agent was enough to satisfy me that it would be practically impossible for us to find a tenant who would be willing to pay enough rent to enable us either to take an apartment or go to a hotel and effect any real saving. Practically every house in New York was for rent, he said; in fact, there were five other houses in our own block on the market.

Everybody had gone to Washington, or was going to spend the winter in the country; he mentioned several of our friends. People were cutting down on

every hand. We might get a tenant at about half what our house might normally be expected to bring; but otherwise he could not give us much encouragement. The renting market had started out well; but lately there had been a bad slump. It was obvious that, unless we practically gave our house away, we should have either to close it up or live in it ourselves.

We considered the former course first. By going to a hotel we should save light, heat, repairs, various maintenance charges, and servants' wages. We should also not have to run our kitchen. We had previously kept ten servants. It would be much cheaper for the three of us and our maid to board at a hotel-say, the Chatwold.

I telephoned to my dapper young friend there and inquired what apartments were still available for the winter. He replied that there was one four-room suite left-but only one-which for a term of six months he would let me "me"-have for nine hundred and seventy-five dollars a month, a substantial concession from ruling rates! I thanked him and hung up. We figured out that, on the basis of the data in hand, it would cost the three of us-with Helen's maid-on a conservative estimate, not a cent less than fifteen hundred dollars a month to live at the Chatwold. For eight months that would amount to twelve thousand dollars-practically as much as it would cost us to run our house.