Page:Rilla of Ingleside (1921).djvu/208

 school. They will not,” said Susan, energetically waving a saucepan with one hand and a soup ladle with the other, “be too proud to fight then.”

On a pale-yellow, windy evening in October Carl Meredith went away. He had enlisted on his eighteenth birthday. John Meredith saw him off with a set face. His two boys were gone—there was only little Bruce left now. He loved Bruce and Bruce’s mother dearly; but Jerry and Carl were the sons of the bride of his youth and Carl was the only one of all his children who had Cecilia’s very eyes. As they looked lovingly out at him above Carl’s uniform the pale minister suddenly remembered the day when for the first and last time he had tried to whip Carl for his prank with the eel. That was the first time he had realized how much Carl’s eyes were like Cecilia’s. Now he realized it again once more. Would he ever again see his dead wife’s eyes looking at him from his son’s face? What a bonny, clean, handsome lad he was! It was—hard—to see him go. John Meredith seemed to be looking at a torn plain strewn with the bodies of “able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five.” Only the other day Carl had been a little scrap of a boy, hunting bugs in Rainbow Valley, taking lizards to bed with him, and scandalizing the Glen by carrying frogs to Sunday School. It seemed hardly—right—somehow that he should be an “able-bodied” man in khaki. Yet John Meredith had said no word to dissuade him when Carl had told him he must go.

Rilla felt Carl’s going keenly. They had always been cronies and playmates. He was only a little older than she was and they had been children in Rain-