Albert took the photograph home and stuck it between the frame and glass of his bureau. Then came a sudden remembrance of his parting with Helen and with it a twinge of conscience. He had begged her to have nothing to do with any other fellow. True she had refused to promise and consequently he also was unbound, but that made no difference—should not make any. So he put the photograph at the back of the drawer where he kept his collars and ties, with a resolve never to look at it. He did not look at it—very often.
Then came another long winter. He ground away at the bookkeeping—he was more proficient at it, but he hated it as heartily as ever—and wrote a good deal of verse and some prose. For the first time he sold a prose article, a short story, to a minor magazine. He wrote long letters to Helen and she replied. She was studying hard, she liked her work, and she had been offered the opportunity to tutor in a girls' summer camp in Vermont during July and August and meant to accept provided her father's health continued good. Albert protested violently against her being absent from South Harniss for so long. “You will scarcely be home at all,” he wrote. “I shall hardly see you. What am I going to do? As it is now I miss you—” and so on for four closely written pages. Having gotten into the spirit of composition he, so to speak, gloried in his loneliness, so much so that Helen was moved to remonstrate. “Your letter made me almost miserable,” she wrote, “until I had read it over twice. Then I began to suspect that you were enjoying your wretchedness, or enjoying writing about it. I truly don't believe anyone—you especially—could be quite as lonesome as all that. Honestly now, Albert, weren't you exaggerating a little? I rather think you were?”
He had been, of course, but it irritated him to think that she recognized the fact. She had an uncanny faculty of seeing through his every pretense. In his next letter he said nothing whatever about being lonesome.
At home, and at the office, the war was what people talked about most of the time. Since the Lusitania's sinking Captain Zelotes had been a battle charger chafing at the bit. He wanted to fight and to fight at once.
“We've got to do it, Mother,” he declared, over and over again. “Sooner or later we've got to fight that Kaiser gang. What are we waitin' for; will somebody tell me that?”
Olive, as usual, was mild and unruffled.
“Probably the President knows as much about it as you and me, Zelotes,” she suggested. “I presume likely he has his own reasons.”
“Humph! When Seth Bassett got up in the night and took a drink out of the bottle of Paris Green by mistake 'Bial Cahoon asked him what in time he kept Paris Green in his bedroom for, anyhow. All that Seth would say was that he had his own reasons. The rest of the town was left to guess what those reasons was. That's what the President's doin'—keepin' us guessin'. By the everlastin', if I was younger I'd ship aboard a British lime-juicer and go and fight, myself!”
It was Rachel Ellis who caused the Captain to be a bit more restrained in his remarks.
“You hadn't ought to talk that way, Cap'n Lote,” she said. “Not when Albert's around, you hadn't.”