There was the possibility, too, of dramatic interest in his arrival. The year before, on his return, at eighteen, he had boldly announced to his father he was going to war. There wasn’t to be a day lost, he wanted to go at once. Every man in his class was going somehow or other. Sterling Blaydon opposed it, the argument dragged out for days, and finally the family won. But it was only with the understanding that if Hal would finish his last year at school he might make his own decision. The country’s participation in the war was now over a year old and the outlook was dismal, one German advance after another having succeeded. There were plenty of youngsters of nineteen and twenty in it, and Hal would insist upon enlisting. He had, as a matter of fact, and as his letters showed, done almost no schooling at Fanstock that year. The entire institution had been made over into a training camp.
Moira remembered how her cousin had chafed the summer before, hating his idleness and the wretched fate of being in excessive demand to entertain girls. Her sympathy with his groans had gone a long way to help her forgive his ill treatment.
And yet she had never been worked up to a pitch of great excitement about the war.
One failing had troubled her ever since she could remember—the tendency to disagree with opinions as soon as an overwhelming majority held them.
It was partly due to the example of Mathilda’s own fastidiousness and independence of judgment, but she went farther than Mathilda, and supposed that she must have inherited this inconvenient trait from that mythical father of whom she had been told so little and longed to know so much. At all events, she arrived at certain conclusions, by herself, about the war: for example, that perhaps Germany was not entirely the instigator, that cruelties were probably practised on both sides—war’s horrors produced them—and that after all it did seem as though the whole world was furiously pitted against two or three caged-in nations.
She did not entirely like herself for these heresies and kept silent upon them. But she promised herself the fun of an argument with Hal. How it would irritate him!
“He’ll think I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps he’ll surrender me to the authorities. How wonderful—I wish he would!”
She took one final glimpse of herself and walked slowly out of the room to face a hard day. She felt she would prove a formidable antagonist for Hal.
But downstairs a surprise was waiting. She found Mathilda, suppressing a few tears, and her Uncle sitting in a profound study. Their disappointment communicated itself to her at once. Something had happened about Hal.
Mrs. Seymour indicated the yellow night-letter on the table.