leave her own house. She take her 'usban' in."

"Then Jules must rent de house. You not detest poor Jules?"

"I not detest him like de hudder one."

"Au 'voir, Clethera."

"Au 'voir, Honore."

They shook hands, the young man wringing him-self away with the
animation of one who goes, the girl standing in the dull anxiety of one
who stays. War, so remote that she had heard of it indifferently,
rushed suddenly from the tropics over the island.

"Are your clothes all mend' and ready, Honore?"

But what thought can a young man give to his clothes when about to
wrap himself in glory? He is politely tapping at the shed window of the
Indian woman, and touching his cap in farewell and gallant capitulation,
and with long-limbed sweeping haste, unusual in a quarter-breed, he is
gone to the docks, with a bundle under one arm, waving his hand as he
passes. All the women and children along the street would turn out
to see him go to the war if his intention were known, and even summer
idlers about the bazars would look at him with new interest.

Clethera could not imagine the moist and horrid heat of those southern
latitudes into which Honore departed to throw himself. Shifting mists on
the lake rim were no vaguer than her conception of her country's mighty
undertaking. But she could feel; and the life she had lived to that day
was wrenched up by the roots, leaving her as with a bleeding socket.

All afternoon she drenched herself with soapsuds in the ferocity of her
washing. By the time Jules returned with the boat, the lake was black
as ink under a storm cloud, with glints of steel; a dull bar stretched
diagonally across the water. Beyond that a whitening of rain showed
against the horizon. Points of cedars on the opposite island pricked a
sullen sky.

Clethera's tubs were under the trees. She paid no attention to what
befell her, or to her grandmother, who called her out of the rain. It
came like a powder of dust, and then a moving, blanched wall, pushing
islands of flattened mist before it. Under a steady pour the waters
turned dull green, and lightened shade by shade as if diluting an
infusion of grass. Waves began to come in regular windrows. Though
Clethera told herself savagely she not care for anything in de world,
her Indian eye took joy of these sights. The shower-bath from the trees
she endured without a shiver.

Jules sat beside Melinda to be comforted He wept for Honore, and praised
his boy, gasconading wit