John ate slowly, his eyes fixed on his plate. Rose ate not at all and looked out of the window, with big tears rolling childishly down her cheeks. She didn't want to go at all now. Her home seemed all at once so comfortable and happy and safe!
John looked up and saw her tears, and immediately he was choked and could not eat.
"There, there! Rosie, don't cry. We'll be all right, and you'll be back almost 'fore you know it. June comes early in the summer, you know." They were both so childlike they did not consider it possible to come home before the year was up. She came around and knelt down by his side and buried her face on his knees.
"I wish I hadn't promised to go," she wailed; "I don't want to go one bit. I want to stay with you."
He understood her feeling and soothed her and diverted her, though tears would have been a relief to him.
She went with him out to the barn, and she cried over the bossies and the horses, and said good-by to them under her breath, so that her father might not hear.
When she went to bed she lay down disconsolate and miserable. O it was so hard to go, and it was hard not to go. Life was not so simple as it had seemed before. Why did this great fear rise up in her heart? Why should she have this terrible revulsion at the last moment? So she thought and thought. Her only stay in the midst of chaos was Dr. Thatcher. William De Lisle was very far away, like a cold white star.
Just as she made up her mind that she could not sleep, she heard her father call her.
"Rose, time to get up!"
Her heart contracted with a sharp spasm that almost made her scream. The time had come for action—momentous, irrevocable action, like Napoleon's embarking from Elba for France.