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 be able to bear up at all, and here you are as cool as a cucumber. I wish I had half your nerve.”

Rilla stood perfectly still. She felt no emotion whatever—she felt nothing. The world of feeling had just gone blank.

“Walter—enlisting”—she heard herself saying—then she heard Irene’s affected little laugh.

“Why, didn’t you know? I thought you did of course, or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. I am always putting my foot in it, amn’t I? Yes, that is what he went to town for today—he told me coming out on the train tonight. I was the first person he told. He isn’t in khaki yet—they were out of uniforms—but he will be in a day or two. I always said Walter had as much pluck as anybody. I assure you I felt proud of him, Rilla, when he told me what he’d done. Oh, there’s an end of Rick MacAllister’s reading. I must fly. I promised I’d play for the next chorus—Alice Clow has such a headache.”

She was gone—oh, thank God, she was gone! Rilla was alone again, staring out at the unchanged, dream-like beauty of moonlit Four Winds. Feeling was coming back to her—a pang of agony so acute as to be almost physical seemed to rend her apart.

“I cannot bear it,” she said. And then came the awful thought that perhaps she could bear it and that there might be years of this hideous suffering before her.

She must get away—she must rush home—she must be alone. She could not go out there and play for drills and give readings and take part in dialogues now. It would spoil half the concert—but that did not matter—nothing mattered. Was this she, Rilla