Page:Rilla of Ingleside (1921).djvu/125

 thought of it. How could I face the reality? There are times when I wish I had never been born. Life has always seemed such a beautiful thing to me—I wanted to make it more beautiful—and now it is a hideous thing. Rilla-my-Rilla, if it weren’t for your letters—your dear, bright, merry, funny, comical, believing letters—I think I'd give up. And Una’s! Una is really a little brick, isn’t she? There's a wonderful fineness and firmness under all that shy, wistful, girlishness of her. She hasn’t your knack of writing laugh-provoking epistles, but there’s something in her letters—I don’t know what—that makes me feel at least while I’m reading them, that I could even go to the front. Not that she ever says a word about my going—or hints that I ought to go—she isn’t that kind. It’s just the spirit of them—the personality that is in them. Well, I can’t go. You have a brother and Una has a friend who is a coward.”

“Oh, I wish Walter wouldn’t write such things,” sighed Rilla. “It hurts me. He isn’t a coward—he isn’t—he isn’t!”

She looked wistfully about her—at the little woodland valley and the grey, lonely fallows beyond. How everything reminded her of Walter! The red leaves still clung to the wild sweet briars that overhung a curve of the brook; their stems were gemmed with the pearls of the gentle rain that had fallen a little while before. Walter had once written a poem describing them. The wind was sighing and rustling among the frosted brown bracken ferns, then lessening sorrowfully away down the brook. Walter had said once that he loved the melancholy of the autumn wind on a November day. The old Tree Lovers still clasped