"Will you telegraph your mother from the station?"
"She wouldn't get it. There is no telephone, and we send only once a day for the mail."
"Then she won't be expecting you?"
"No, she won't be expecting me."
At this Blackburn turned. "What can we do, Miss Meade, to help you?"
Again she seemed to herself to answer with her lips before she had selected the words, "Nothing, thank you. There is absolutely nothing that you can do." The soft wind had loosened a lock of hair under her veil, and putting up her hand, she pushed it back into place.
Rain had fallen in the night, and the morning was fresh and fine, with a sky of cloudless turquoise blue. The young green leaves by the roadside shone with a sparkling lustre, while every object in the landscape appeared to quiver and glisten in the spring sunlight.
"I shall never see it again—I shall never see it again." Suddenly, without warning, Caroline's thoughts came flocking back as riotously as they had done through the long, sleepless night. The external world at which she looked became a part of the intense inner world of her mind; and the mental vacancy was crowded in an instant with a vivid multitude of figures. Every thought, every sensation, every image of the imagination and of memory, seemed to glitter with a wonderful light and freshness, as the objects in the landscape glittered when the April sunshine streamed over them.
"Yes, I am leaving it forever. I shall never see it again, but why should I care so much? Why does it make me so unhappy, as if it were tearing the heart out of my breast? Life is always that—leaving things forever, and giving up what you would rather keep. I have left places I cared for before, and yet I have never felt like this, not even when I came away for the first time from The Cedars. Every minute I am going farther and farther away. We are in the city now; flags are shining, too, in the sun. I have never seen so many flags—as if flags alone meant war! War! Why, I had almost forgotten the war! And yet it is the most tremendous thing that has ever been on the earth, and nothing else really matters—neither Briarlay, nor Mrs. Blackburn, nor my life, nor Mr. Blackburn's, nor anything that happened last night. It was all so little—as little as the thing Mrs. Blackburn is trying to get, the thing she calls happiness. It is as little as the thing I have lost—as little as my aching heart——"
"Do you know," said Mrs. Timberlake, "I had not realized that we were at war—but look at the flags!" Her lustreless eyes were lifted, with a kind of ecstasy, in the sunlight, and then as no one answered, she added softly, "It makes one stop and think."