"And have you noticed," she continued, while the girls stopped their work to watch her, "what happens if you ask them about their home folks? Their faces light up, and right away they begin to talk about 'mother.'
"'You know,' one of them said to me just a little while ago, 'when I first came to camp, I didn't exactly feel homesick, as I'd expected to; I just felt queer and uneasy and restless. For a couple of nights I couldn't sleep, just kept tossing and turning till reveille routed me out again. Then suddenly, one night, I found out what the matter was. I wasn't homesick; I was just missing my mother.'
"I smiled at him, trying my best not to cry, and said: 'Home is mother, isn't it?'
"Then the boy just turned away, and I knew it was because his eyes were misty and he was ashamed to let me see it, and when he looked at me again he was smiling a little wistfully.
"A few days after that he came up to me. 'You won't laugh, if I tell you something?' he asked. 'On my word of honor,' I answered him. 'Well,' he said, looking so dear and sheepish, I had all I could do to keep from hugging him, 'as soon as I found out what you said about home being mother, I just put the picture I had of her under my pillow, and honest, I've slept like a baby ever since.'"
The girls were all crying and Mollie impatiently shook a tear from the tip of her nose. "Betty, you never told us that before. If his mother could only know about it."
"She probably does," said Betty, wiping her eyes and taking up her knitting again. "Somehow, most mothers know those things by instinct."
"And to think boys like that," cried Mollie, knitting fast to keep time with her feelings, "to think boys like that have to go over to the other side, and be mowed down by the thousands. Oh, I can't believe it!"
"I guess we've all sort of closed our eyes to it, till now," said Grace, so unlike her usual self that she had completely forgotten to eat candy for fifteen minutes. "But we can't go on like that forever. When it comes right down to us and we lose somebody we care for—" her voice broke and the girls went on knitting faster than ever, fearing a general breakdown.
"We've just got to work so hard we can't think," said Mollie with decision, adding, a little hysterically: "It never used to be hard before."