"I wonder how Letty is getting on?" asked Caroline, in the pause. "Have you heard anything of her?"
"Oh, she is all right, I think. They have a nurse there who is looking after her until they find a good governess. She must miss her mother terribly, but she doesn't show it a bit. I must say she always seemed to me to be a child of very little feeling. If I go away for a week, my children cry their eyes out, and Letty has lost her mother, and no one would ever know it to watch her."
"She is a reserved child, but I am sure she has feeling," said Caroline.
"Of course you know her better than I do, and, anyhow, you couldn't expect a child not to show the effects of the kind of home life she has had. I tell Robert that our first duty in life is to provide the memory of a happy home for our children. It means so much when you're grown, don't you think, to look back on a pleasant childhood? As for Letty she might as well be an orphan now that David Blackburn has gone to France——"
"To France?" For a minute it seemed to Caroline that claws were tearing her heart, and the dull ache which she had felt for months changed into a sharp and unendurable pain. Then the grey sky and grey street and grey dust intermingled, and went round and round in a circle.
"You hadn't heard? Why, he went last week, or it may be that he is going next week—I can't remember which. Robert didn't know exactly what he was to do—some kind of constructive work, he said, for the Government. I never get things straight, but all I know is that everything seems to be for the Government now. I declare, I never worked so hard in my life as I have done in the last six or eight months, and Robert has been in Washington simply slaving his head off for a dollar a year. It does one good, I suppose. Mr. Courtland preached a beautiful sermon last Sunday about it, and I never realized before how wonderfully we have all grown in spirit since the war began. I said to Mrs. Mallow, as I came out, that it was so comforting to feel that we had been developing all the time without knowing it, or having to bother about it. Of course, we did know that we had been very uncomfortable, but that isn't quite the same, and now I can stand giving up things so much better when I realize that I am getting them all back, even if it's just spiritually. Don't you think that is a lovely way to feel about it?"
"I must go," said Caroline breathlessly. Her pulses were hammering in her ears, and she could scarcely hear what Daisy was saying.
"Well, good-bye. I am so glad to have seen you. Are you going to France like everybody else?"
"I hope so. I have offered my services."
"Then you are just as wild about war work as I am. I'd give anything on earth to go over with the Y. M. C. A., and I tell Robert that the only thing that keeps me back is the children."