"P.S. I would like Rosa to write and tell me how she gets on at school."
She wrote the school next and when that was done she sat back in her chair and looked out of the window at the birds and the flowers and the bees that flew among the flowers.
"What a queer thing it is—love, or whatever they call it," she thought. "The things it has done to people—right in this house! I guess it's like fire—a good servant but a bad master—"
She thought of what it had done to Josiah—and to Josiah's son. She thought of what it had done to Ma'm Maynard, what it was doing to Helen, how it had left Aunt Cordelia and Aunt Patty untouched.
"It's like some sort of a fever," she told herself. "You never know whether you're going to catch it or not—or when you're going to catch, it—or what it's going to do to you—"
She walked to the window and rather unsteadily her hand arose to her breast.
"I wonder if I shall ever catch it…." she thought. "I wonder what it will do to me…!"
CHAPTER XXI
Archey Forbes came back in the beginning of May and the first call he made was to the house on the hill. He had brought with him a collection of souvenirs—a trench-made ring, shrapnel fragments of curious shapes, the inevitable helmet and a sword handle with a piece of wire attached.
"It was part of our work once," he said, "to find booby traps and make them harmless. This was in a barn, looking as though some one had tried to hide his sword in the hay. It looked funny to me, so I went at it easy and found the wire connected to a fuse. There was enough explosive to blow up the barn and everybody around there, but it wouldn't blow up a hill of bears when we got through with it."