"I don't want to go back to school," grumbled Jimmie, "Not after I've passed next summer, anyway."
"John doesn't want to stay here on the farm. He'd like to go to the Front, but he stays. You are young and you will be needed later. So be a man and do your duty. All the soldiers aren't going info the trenches."
But his advice had little effect on Jimmie, the war fever was in his veins. He gave his promise, however, to wait until he was eighteen, and Neil had to be content. But he was restless and fretful under the restriction, he felt quite sure that the war would all be over long before that date and his great opportunity would be gone.
Meanwhile Orchard Glen was slowly waking up at the call for men. Tommy Holmes rushed into khaki after the first glorious sight of the Lindsay boys in the village street, and Tremendous K.'s eldest son followed. And Christina had the heavy task of writing to Ellen to tell her that Bruce had given up his prospects of being a Doctor, and was enlisted with the University corps. Mr. Sinclair's only son, who was a minister in a neighbouring town, came home to say farewell, dressed in his chaplain's uniform, and the little village lived in a whirl of excitement.
The Red Cross Society was busy night and day making socks for the boys who had left, with the result that they each one got far more than any young man with only two feet could possibly wear.
All this stir, and the sight of so much khaki coming and going in the village had a bad effect upon Dr. McGarry. Every day he took the war more grievously to heart. He and Mr. Holmes took different sides as to the conduct of the spring campaign, and after Tommy enlisted it was not safe for the Doctor to go into the store, so high did feeling run.
And at home the Doctor was even worse, until poor Mrs. Sutherland's life was scarcely worth living. Wallace unwittingly brought down a torrent of wrath upon his head one day when the Spring Drive was on and prospects were looking black. It was an inopportune moment for Wallace to broach the subject upon which he had been thinking deeply for many days.
"Uncle," he said, as they sat down to their pretty tea-table in the sun-flooded dining-room. "I'd like to go on a farm this Spring. That Ford place below the mill is for sale, and the Browns are talking of buying it. You've always wanted to retire on a farm and I could start the work and——"
He paused, interrupted by his mother's dismayed exclamation. "Wallace! You with your prospects to settle down here and be a common farmer! Surely you don't mean it!"
"Elinor, don't be foolish!" snapped her brother, looking up from a dreary paragraph concerning a British reverse that was attempting to appear as a strategic move. "You might be glad to have him a common farmer, as you call it. And as for his prospects, I don't see what they are, to tell you the truth."