Mother dearest, I love you.
Mrs. Rich sat down on the old haircloth sofa and seemed a little faint. She was smiling bravely, but her lips were so blue that her husband brought her a glass of water with a little brandy in it.
Then she showed him the news.
“I was afraid of it,” he said. “I hoped we’d get here before it happened.”
Jean seized the note and read it. Then she laid it carefully on the table and knelt beside her mother.
Next morning Dr. Rich had a physician come down from Sault Sainte Marie to see his wife. After that he kept a tiny hypodermic syringe where he could lay a hand on it.
Twin-flowers were faintly blushing on Jean’s island, which was called the Duckling, but they faded before any news came from Horatio. Eglantine came and blushed more deeply, bringing his first letter. Horatio wrote of his preparations as if Germans were wild wolves.
Over behind the hill balsams were fragrant in the August sun, unaware that in South America there is another fragrant balsam, named tolu, whence toluene. Hewn out among the balsams lay Dr. Rich’s garden, on which he had labored for nearly half a century. In it were sweet peas of every hue, and green peas now ready to eat. The nodules on the roots had stored up nitrogen along with ravishing colors and delicious taste. But little the old soldier suspected that the grandsons of his comrades were taking toluene out of tar, to mix with nitrogen and pack into shrapnel. Nor, when he lovingly surveyed the yellow crystals that his son had left him to soothe the pain of burns, did he suspect that Americans were filling bombs with that stuff and shipping them to France for the ammunition dumps of the Canadian army.
September, and rock-rose shone with goldenrod like ore among the quartz. Then came a letter from France. Horatio had ceased to hate the Germans, but still stuck to his theory of unifying earth by nitrogen. The only way to persuade men that earth is holy was to show them the leveling effect of explosives. The war was pretty terrible, but he thought it much less terrible than might have been expected in an age so scientific.
Jean had seen for a month that there was no returning to college. Her mother needed her, and she was happy to stay. Studying chemistry was out of the question, but she would perfect herself in Ojibway and she would read Lucretius.