Then their hands dropped apart, and both laughed uneasily, as they glanced with a shamefaced air about the table.
"Tut! Tut!" said Doctor John. "That precious king of yours bids fair to make life damnably serious, Jim. Send him away from the table at once!"
But the diversion came too late; for Barbara was weeping heedlessly, and Mistress Mehitable, with her white chin quivering, was dabbing her handkerchief to her eyes with an air of vexation at her own weakness; while good Mrs. Sawyer gazed at them both in wide-eyed, uncomprehending wonder.
"If there's a war," sobbed Barbara, "you sha'nt go to it, either of you! We need you, here. And—and—you'd both get killed, I know! You're both so splendid and big and tall,—and you wouldn't—take care of yourselves, and the bullets couldn't miss you!"
At this picture Mistress Mehitable grew pale, where she had been red, and cast a frightened look at Doctor Jim, then at Doctor John,—then back at Doctor Jim.
"Barbara's right, I think," she said, with an air of having weighed the question quite dispassionately. "You should not leave your patients, on any account. There are so many men who can destroy life, so few who can save it. Physicians have no right to go soldiering."
"That's just it, honey!" cried Barbara, flashing radiant eyes through her tears. "Oh, what a wise little Aunt Hitty you are! What would we ever do without you!" And her apprehensions laid themselves obediently to rest.
"Well, well!" cried Doctor Jim. "What are two graceless old dogs like us, that the dear eyes of the fairest of their sex should shed tears on our account? We should go and kick each other up and down the length of Second Westings for the rest of the afternoon, for causing such precious tears,—eh, what, John Pigeon?"
"'Tis the least we can do, Jim!" said Doctor John. "But now I come to think of it, we needn't arrange to go to the war before there's a war to go to, after all."
"And when the war does come, you'll both stay right here, where you belong!" decreed Barbara, holding the question well settled.