She looked at her son and then her nephew. “You are so like in your uniforms I would not know you apart on the street in the dark,” she said. Richard shot a merry glance in his uncle’s eyes, then only smiled decorously with him and Peter Junior.
“I wish you’d visit the camp and see us drill. We go like clockwork, Peter and I. They call us the twins.”
“There is a very good reason for that, for your mother and I were twins, and you resemble her, while Peter Junior resembles me,” said the Elder.
“Yes,” said Hester, “Peter Junior looks like his father;” but as she glanced at her son she knew his soul was hers.
Thus the meal passed in quiet, decorous talk, touching on nothing vital, but holding a smoldering fire underneath. The young men said nothing about the fact that the regiment had been called to duty, and soon the camp on the bluff would be breaking up. They dared not touch on the past, and they as little dared touch on the future––indeed there might be no future. So they talked of indifferent things, and Hester parted with her nephew as if they were to meet again soon, except that she called him back when he was halfway down the steps and kissed him again. As for her son, she took him up to his room and there they stayed for an hour, and then he came out and she was left in the house alone.
CHAPTER IV
LEAVE-TAKING
Early in the morning, while the earth was still a mass of gray shadow and mist, and the sky had only begun to show faint signs of the flush of dawn, Betty, awake and alert, crept softly out of bed, not to awaken Martha, who slept the sleep of utter weariness at her side. Martha had returned only the day before from her visit to her grandfather’s, a long carriage ride away from Leauvite.