With a little jerk Betty hung up the receiver, and sat staring out of the window with the tears streaming down her cheeks. She brushed them away impatiently and felt feverishly for her pocket handkerchief.
"Oh, I h-hate the old Kaiser, and I hate the old war, and I h-hate everything!" she wailed, rolling the handkerchief up into a miserable little ball. "Wh-what will we do when the b-boys are gone and we haven't anything to do, but just think of the time they'll be sent over to France to get k-killed? Oh, Betty, don't act so f-foolish," she scolded, putting away the handkerchief with an air of decision. "You know you wouldn't have had them do anything else anyway——
"Oh, there's that old telephone again.
"Yes, hello, Mollie.—Isn't it terrible?—Oh, do come around—and stay for supper.—I—can't bear to be left alone.—Good-bye."
"Well, what are we going to do?"
The four girls had gathered once more on Betty's porch and were regarding each other mournfully.
"Do?" echoed Grace. "Why, we can't do anything, of course, but let them go."
"But it won't seem at all like Deepdale!" mourned Amy.
"Well, the only thing I can see that we can do," sighed Mollie, "is to become Red Cross nurses and go across with them."
"That probably wouldn't do any good, either," objected Betty, "as far as being with the boys is concerned, because we'd probably be sent to another part of the field entirely, and probably wouldn't see them from the beginning of the war to the end of it. No, I guess we'll just have to keep on knitting for them."