Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled glade.
“I should think his people would feel as though they couldn’t stand it!” Elliott declared. “If he had got to France—but now it is just a hideous, hideous waste!”
Bruce hesitated. “I suppose that is one way of looking at it.”
“Why, what other way could there be?” She stared at him in surprise. “He was just learning to fly. He hadn’t done anything, had he?”
“No, he hadn’t done anything. But what he died for is just the same as though he had got across, isn’t it, and had downed forty Huns?”
She continued to stare fixedly at the boy for a full minute. “Why, yes,” she said at last, very slowly; “yes, I suppose it is.” Curiously enough, the whole thing looked better from that angle.
For a long time she was silent, cutting and tying up ferns.
“How did you happen to think of that?”
“To think of what?” Bruce was tying his own ferns.