od hadn't meant it?"

"I don't know. Sometimes it seems as if God had put this world into
men's keeping to work it as they pleased."

"Now, George, that is blasphemy."

"Well, I won't blaspheme. I'll try to believe in your pocket
Providence," he said, and then he rose to go.

"Why don't you stay to dinner?" Dinner at Balcom's Works was at one
o'clock.

"I'll come back to supper, if you'll let me. Perhaps I shall bring you a
convert."

"Well, you may come back, on that condition."

"All right. If I don't come, you'll understand?"

He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a suspension of their
engagement. It all interested her intensely; she was undergoing a
tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it. While she stood
looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows,
on to the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness.

"Why didn't he stay to dinner?"

"Because--because--war has been declared," Editha pronounced, without
turning.

Her mother said, "Oh, my!" and then said nothing more until she had sat
down in one of the large Shaker chairs, and rocked herself for some
time. Then she closed whatever tacit passage of thought there had been
in her mind with the spoken words, "Well, I hope _he_ won't go."

"And _I_ hope he _will_" the girl said, and confronted her mother with a
stormy exaltation that would have frightened any creature less
unimpressionable than a cat.

Her mother rocked herself again for an interval of cogitation. What she
arrived at in speech was, "Well, I guess you've done a wicked thing,
Editha Balcom."

The girl said, as she passed indoors through the same window her mother
had come out by, "I haven't done anything--yet."

* * * * *

In her room, she put together all her letters and gifts from Gearson,
down to the withered petals of the first flower he had offered, with
that timidity of his veiled in that irony of his. In the heart of the
packet she enshrined her engagement ring which she had restored to the
pretty box he had brought it her in. Then she sat down, if not calmly
yet strongly, and wrote:

"GEORGE: I understood--when you left me. But I think we had
better emphasize your meaning that if we cannot be one in
everything we had better be one in nothing. So I am sending
these things for your keeping till you have made up your mind.

"I shall always love you, and therefore I s