A wicked little voice suggested another idea. What if she should come back sometime to find Billy in love with someone else? Men were so queer. She had known them to be married a year after some girl had supposedly broken their hearts, and to actually fall desperately and permanently in love with their wives. The possibility made her furious. If only Billy had had Dr. Knight’s position—he would have been so everlastingly good to live with, and recklessly she made up her mind that if nothing materialized from her season in town—if Dr. Knight remained indefinite, she would come back and marry Billy. She couldn’t go on a farm with him, of course, and she couldn’t live all her life in small towns like this, but he could get something else to do; she had heard a man tell her father that he hoped to see him in the federal parliament some day. So if nothing else developed, she would marry Billy. The idea left her feeling beautifully generous and secure.
CHAPTER XII.
“These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene
That men call age; and those who would have been
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.”—Rupert Brooke.
There was no sense of loss for Billy in the days that followed Miss Evison’s leaving the neighborhood—you can’t lose a thing you never had. Removed from the fascination of her presence, and reviewing one incident after another, there was only one theory to accept. It had been the affair of a moment for her, a diversion acceptable for the want of something better; now it was over, and she wanted to be free from any further obligation. Still, it was disconcerting to an agricultural expert, holding forth late in some village hall, while the fire in the boxstove burned low and the frost patterns crept over the steamy window panes, to have his efforts to inspire a sleepy audience with the need of greater production, suddenly sidetracked by a vision of a regal little figure in some palm-bordered ballroom, brilliant and excited and restless as a beautiful moth that has found the light.
He had now considerable free time in the evenings
which might be turned to good account in his work, but people had become so accustomed to finding the office locked at night, that they had stopped calling, and it would be difficult to win back their interest. With notes of Miss Evison’s social engagements in town constantly finding their way into the local papers, he could scarcely advertise that henceforth his evenings would be at the service of the community.
But it was not the blow of Miss Evison’s dismissal, nor dissatisfaction with his work, which turned his affairs in another direction where things like these don’t count for much. It was the first winter of the war and like many another young man absorbed in the peaceful industries of the green country, the Representative had had some serious debates with himself. The men who directed his work, peering through the chaos of the country’s general unpreparedness to probable starvation ahead, kept the wires from head quarters hot, suggesting plans for growing bigger crops in the district, leaving it with the Representative to put the plans before the people. This they considered his best service just then. At the same time newspapers were bringing home reports that made it hard for men to go on tilling their fields, even to feed the men who were fighting, or the people whose homes had been outraged by an invading army.
Most of these steady, thinking young men with
ambitions in other directions, made no attempt to explain the motives which led them to put away all the things they cared for to enter a new life as hateful as it was strange to them. It might have been just the chivalry that guided their every-day conduct in less spectacular ways, or the more plebeian, but equally unselfish, spirit of doing an unpleasant, but necessary, thing because someone had to do it; perhaps the comradeship with others who were making the sacrifice had some part. Anyway, without discussion or ceremony, the Representative gave up his plans for the community and the possibilities of the place on the hill, which of course didn’t mean anything now, anyway, and joined the county battalion. It would have been harder if his mother had been living, but as things were he reasoned it wouldn’t matter much to anyone but Jean, and she had developed a splendid faculty for taking care of herself. It was difficult to associate the easy, self-assured young varsity student with the shy little school-teacher who in the years when she felt the loss of her mother most, had cried to him over problems on which he was helplessly ignorant. His unfailing solution was to send her to Ruth Macdonald for advice, until she acquired the habit of going herself, and didn’t need his help any more. In one way, however, Jean remained unchanged from the little girl who had trotted after him everywhere
with the faithfulness of a little spaniel. He had taught her to climb trees, and skate, and swim, and though naturally timid and afraid of the water, she would float with him, perfectly confident, out to the deepest places. When, nervous and ill with the loneliness of her first school, she had sent for him, he had only to gather her up like the child she was, and she went right to sleep, secure and quiet in the strength and gentleness of his great body. With all the admirable, twentieth-century young woman’s independence, he knew that the hero worship of the little sister remained the same, and at the thought of leaving her he was painfully conscious of his neglect since his interests and his holidays had been given so wholly to Miss Evison.