Laura shook her head.
“Gee!” said the boy.
“Perhaps she thought she couldn’t,” hesitated Laura, “and go over there.”
A moment of silence held the room. Henry broke it. “Well, we’re not going. Let’s hear ’em.”
Elliott took a step toward the door.
“Needn’t run away unless you want to,” he called after her. “We always read Bob’s letters aloud.”
So Elliott stayed. Laura’s pleasant voice, a bit strained at first, grew steadier as the reading proceeded. Henry sat whittling a stick into the coal-hod, his lips pursed as though for a whistle, but without 129 sound, and still with that odd sober look on his face. Priscilla, all the jumpiness gone out of her, stood very still in the middle of the kitchen floor, a kind of hurt bewilderment in the big dark eyes fixed on Laura’s face. Nobody laughed, nobody even chuckled, and yet it was a jolly letter that they read first, full of spirit and life and fun. High-hearted adventure rollicked through it, and the humor that makes light of hardship, and the latest slang of the front adorned its pages with grotesquely picturesque phrases. The Cameron boys were obviously getting a good time out of the war. Bob had got something else, too. The letter had been delayed in transmission and near the end was a sentence, “Brought down my first Hun to-day—great fight! I’ll tell you about it next time if after due deliberation I decide the censor will let me.”
“Some letter!” commented Henry. “Say, those aviators are living like princes, 130 aren’t they! Mess hall in a big grove with all the fixings. And eats! More than we get at home. Gee, I wish I was older!”
“So you could come in for the eats?” smiled his sister.
“So I could come in for things generally.”