Rilla was writhing. Hadn’t Susan any realization that she was addressing an officer of the Canadian Army? Apparently she had not. Oh, what would Ken think? “I suppose you do not remember the time your mother spanked you either,” continued Susan, who seemed to be bent on reviving tender reminiscences that evening. “I shall never, no never, forget it. She was up here one night with you when you were about three, and you and Walter were playing out in the kitchen yard with a kitten. I had a big puncheon of rainwater by the spout which I was reserving for making soap. And you and Walter began quarrelling over the kitten. Walter was at one side of the puncheon standing on a chair, holding the kitten, and you were standing on a chair at the other side. You leaned across that puncheon and grabbed the kitten and pulled. You were always a great hand for taking what you wanted without too much ceremony. Walter held on tight and the poor kitten yelled but you dragged Walter and the kitten half over and then you both lost your balance and tumbled into that puncheon, kitten and all. If I had not been on the spot you would both have been drowned. I flew to the rescue and hauled you all three out before much harm was done, and your mother, who had seen it all from the upstairs window, came down and picked you up, dripping as you were, and gave you a beautiful spanking. Ah,” said Susan with a sigh, “those were happy old days at Ingleside.”

  “Must have been,” said Ken. His voice sounded queer and stiff. Rilla supposed he was hopelessly enraged. The truth was he dared not trust his voice lest it betray his frantic desire to laugh.

  “Rilla here, now,” said Susan, looking affectionately at that unhappy damsel, “never was much spanked. She was a real well-behaved child for the most part. But her father did spank her once. She got two bottles of pills out of his office and dared Alice Clow to see which of them could swallow all the pills first, and if her father had not happened in the nick of time those two children would have been corpses by night. As it was, they were both sick enough shortly after. But the doctor spanked Rilla then and there and he made such a thorough job of it that she never meddled with anything in his office afterwards. We hear a great deal nowadays of something that is called ‘moral persuasion,’ but in my opinion a good spanking and no nagging afterwards is a much better thing.”

  Rilla wondered viciously whether Susan meant to relate all the family spankings. But Susan had finished with the subject and branched off to another cheerful one.

  “I remember little Tod MacAllister over-harbour killed himself that very way, eating up a whole box of fruitatives because he thought they were candy. It was a very sad affair. He was,” said Susan earnestly, “the very cutest little corpse I ever laid my eyes on. It was very careless of his mother to leave the fruitatives where he could get them, but she was well-known to be a heedless creature. One day she found a nest of five eggs as she was going across the fields to church with a brand new blue silk dress on. So she put them in the pocket of her petticoat and when she got to church she forgot all about them and sat down on them and her dress was ruined, not to speak of the petticoat. Let me see—would not Tod be some relation of yours? Your great grandmother West was a MacAllister. Her brother Amos was a MacDonaldite in religion. I am told he used to take the jerks something fearful. But you look more like your great grandfather West than the MacAllisters. He died of a paralytic stroke quite early in life.”

  “Did you see anybody at the store?” asked Rilla desperately, in the faint hope of directing Susan’s conversation into more agreeable channels.

  “Nobody except Mary Vance,” said Susan, “and she was stepping round as brisk as the Irishman’s flea.”

  What terrible similes Susan used! Would Kenneth think she acquired them from the family!

  “To hear Mary talk about Miller Douglas you would think he was the only Glen boy who had enlisted,” Susan went on. “But of course she always did brag and she has some good qualities I am willing to admit, though I did not think so that time she chased Rilla here through the village with a dried codfish till the poor child fell, heels over head, into the puddle before Carter Flagg’s store.”

  Rilla went cold all over with wrath and shame. Were there any more disgraceful scenes in her past that Susan could rake up? As for Ken, he could have howled over Susan’s speeches, but he would not so insult the duenna of his lady, so he sat with a preternaturally solemn face which seemed to poor Rilla a haughty and offended one.

  “I paid eleven cents for a bottle of ink tonight,” complained Susan. “Ink is twice as high as it was last year. Perhaps it is because Woodrow Wilson has been writing so many notes. It must cost him considerable. My cousin Sophia says Woodrow Wilson is not the man she expected him to be—but then no man ever was. Being an old maid, I do not know much about men and have never pretended to, but my cousin Sophia is very hard on them, although she married two of them, which you might think was a fair share. Albert Crawford’s chimney blew down in that big gale we had last week, and when Sophia heard the bricks clattering on the roof she thought it was a Zeppelin raid and went into hysterics. And Mrs. Albert Crawford says that of the two things she would have preferred the Zeppelin raid.”

  Rilla sat limply in her chair like one hypnotized. She knew Susan would stop talking when she was ready to stop and that no earthly power could make her stop any sooner. As a rule, she was very fond of Susan but just now she hated her with a deadly hatred. It was ten o’clock. Ken would soon have to go—the others would soon be home—and she had not even had a chance to explain to Ken that Fred Arnold filled no blank in her life nor ever could. Her rainbow castle lay in ruins round her.

  Kenneth got up at last. He realized that Susan was there to stay as long as he did, and it was a three mile walk to Martin West’s over-harbour. He wondered if Rilla had put Susan up to this, not wanting to be left alone with him, lest he say something Fred Arnold’s sweetheart did not want to hear. Rilla got up, too, and walked silently the length of the veranda with him. They stood there for a moment, Ken on the lower step. The step was half sunk into the earth and mint grew thickly about and over its edge. Often crushed by so many passing feet it gave out its essence freely, and the spicy odour hung round them like a soundless, invisible benediction. Ken looked up at Rilla, whose hair was shining in the moonlight and whose eyes were pools of allurement. All at once he felt sure there was nothing in that gossip about Fred Arnold.

  “Rilla,” he said in a sudden, intense whisper, “you are the sweetest thing.”

  Rilla flushed and looked at Susan. Ken looked, too, and saw that Susan’s back was turned. He put his arm about Rilla and kissed her. It was the first time Rilla had ever been kissed. She thought perhaps she ought to resent it but she didn’t. Instead, she glanced timidly into Kenneth’s seeking eyes and her glance was a kiss.

  “Rilla-my-Rilla,” said Ken, “will you promise that you won’t let anyone else kiss you until I come back?”

  “Yes,” said Rilla, trembling and thrilling.

  Susan was turning round. Ken loosened his hold and stepped to the walk.

  “Good-bye,” he said casually. Rilla heard herself saying it just as casually. She stood and watched him down the walk, out of the gate, and down the road. When the fir wood hid him from her sight she suddenly said “Oh,” in a choked way and ran down to the gate, sweet blossomy things catching at her skirts as she ran. Leaning over the gate she saw Kenneth walking briskly down the road, over the bars of tree shadows and moonlight, his tall, erect figure grey in the white radiance. As he reached the turn he stopped and looked back and saw her standing amid the tall white lilies by the gate. He waved his hand—she waved hers—he was gone around the turn.

  Rilla stood there for a little while, gazing across the fields of mist and silver. She had heard her mother say that she loved turns in roads—they were so provocative and alluring. Rilla thought she hated them. She had seen Jem and Jerry vanish from her around a bend in the road—then Walter—and now Ken. Brothers and playmate and sweetheart—they were all gone, never, it might be, to return. Yet still the Piper piped and the dance of death went on.

  When Rilla walked slowly back to the house Susan was still sitting by the veranda table and Susan was sniffing suspiciously.

  “I have been thinking, Rilla dear, of the old days in the House of Dreams, when Kenneth’s mother and father were courting and Jem was a little baby and you were not born or thought of. It was a very romantic affair and she and your mother were such chums. To think I should have lived to see her son going to the front. As if she had not had enough trouble in her early life without this coming upon her! But we must take a brace and see it through.”

  All Rilla’s anger against Susan had evaporated. With Ken’s kiss still burning on her lips, and the wonderful significance of the promise he had asked thrilling heart and soul, she could not be angry with anyone. She put her slim white hand into Susan’s brown, work-hardened one and gave it a squeeze. Susan was a faithful old dear and would lay down her life for any one of them.

  “You are tired, Rilla dear, and had better go to bed,” Susan said, patting her hand. “I noticed you were too tired to talk tonight. I am glad I came home in time to help you out. It is very tiresome trying to entertain young men when you are not accustomed to it.”

  Rilla carried Jims upstairs and went to bed, but not before she had sat for a long time at her window reconstructing her rainbow castle, with several added domes and turrets.

  “I wonder,” she said to herself, “if I am, or am not, engaged to Kenneth Ford.”

  CHAPTER XVII.THE WEEKS WEAR BY

  Rilla read her first love letter in her Rainbow Valley fir-shadowed nook, and a girl’s first love letter, whatever blase, older people may think of it, is an event of tremendous importance in the teens. After Kenneth’s regiment had left Kingsport there came a fortnight of dully-aching anxiety and when the congregation sang in Church on Sunday evenings,

  “Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee

  For those in peril on the sea,”

  Rilla’s voice always failed her; for with the words came a horribly vivid mind picture of a submarined ship sinking beneath pitiless waves amid the struggles and cries of drowning men. Then word came that Kenneth’s regiment had arrived safely in England; and now, at last, here was his letter. It began with something that made Rilla supremely happy for the moment and ended with a paragraph that crimsoned her cheeks with the wonder and thrill and delight of it. Between beginning and ending the letter was just such a jolly, newsy epistle as Ken might have written to anyone; but for the sake of that beginning and ending Rilla slept with the letter under her pillow for weeks, sometimes waking in the night to slip her fingers under and just touch it, and looked with secret pity on other girls whose sweethearts could never have written them anything half so wonderful and exquisite. Kenneth was not the son of a famous novelist for nothing. He “had a way” of expressing things in a few poignant, significant words that seemed to suggest far more than they uttered, and never grew stale or flat or foolish with ever so many scores of readings. Rilla went home from Rainbow Valley as if she flew rather than walked.

  But such moments of uplift were rare that autumn. To be sure, there was one day in September when great news came of a big Allied victory in the west and Susan ran out to hoist the flag—the first time she had hoisted it since the Russian line broke and the last time she was to hoist it for many dismal moons.

  “Likely the Big Push has begun at last, Mrs. Dr. dear,” she exclaimed, “and we will soon see the finish of the Huns. Our boys will be home by Christmas now. Hurrah!”

  Susan was ashamed of herself for hurrahing the minute she had done it, and apologized meekly for such an outburst of juvenility. “But indeed, Mrs. Dr. dear, this good news has gone to my head after this awful summer of Russian slumps and Gallipoli setbacks.”

  “Good news!” said Miss Oliver bitterly. “I wonder if the women whose men have been killed for it will call it good news. Just because our own men are not on that part of the front we are rejoicing as if the victory had cost no lives.”

  “Now, Miss Oliver dear, do not take that view of it,” deprecated Susan. “We have not had much to rejoice over of late and yet men were being killed just the same. Do not let yourself slump like poor Cousin Sophia. She said, when the word came, ‘Ah, it is nothing but a rift in the clouds. We are up this week but we will be down the next.’ ‘Well, Sophia Crawford,’ said I,—for I will never give in to her, Mrs. Dr. dear—’God himself cannot make two hills without a hollow between them, as I have heard it said, but that is no reason why we should not take the good of the hills when we are on them.’ But Cousin Sophia moaned on. ‘Here is the Gallipolly expedition a failure and the Grand Duke Nicholas sent off, and everyone knows the Czar of Rooshia is a pro-German and the Allies have no ammunition and Bulgaria is going against us. And the end is not yet, for England and France must be punished for their deadly sins until they repent in sackcloth and ashes.’ ‘I think myself,’ I said, ‘that they will do their repenting in khaki and trench mud, and it seems to me that the Huns should have a few sins to repent of also.’ ‘They are instruments in the hands of the Almighty, to purge the garner,’ said Sophia. And then I got mad, Mrs. Dr. dear, and told her I did not and never would believe that the Almighty ever took such dirty instruments in hand for any purpose whatever, and that I did not consider it decent for her to be using the words of Holy Writ as glibly as she was doing in ordinary conversation. She was not, I told her, a minister or even an elder. And for the time being I squelched her, Mrs. Dr. dear. Cousin Sophia has no spirit. She is very different from her niece, Mrs. Dean Crawford over-harbour. You know the Dean Crawfords had five boys and now the new baby is another boy. All the connection and especially Dean Crawford were much disappointed because their hearts had been set on a girl; but Mrs. Dean just laughed and said, ‘Everywhere I went this summer I saw the sign “MEN WANTED” staring me in the face. Do you think I could go and have a girl under such circumstances?’ There is spirit for you, Mrs. Dr. dear. But Cousin Sophia would say the child was just so much more cannon fodder.”

  Cousin Sophia had full range for her pessimism that gloomy autumn, and even Susan, incorrigible old optimist as she was, was hard put to it for cheer. When Bulgaria lined up with Germany Susan only remarked scornfully, “One more nation anxious for a licking,” but the Greek tangle worried her beyond her powers of philosophy to endure calmly.

  “Constantine of Greece has a German wife, Mrs. Dr. dear, and that fact squelches hope. To think that I should have lived to care what kind of a wife Constantine of Greece had! The miserable creature is under his wife’s thumb and that is a bad place for any man to be. I am an old maid and an old maid has to be independent or she will be squashed out. But if I had been a married woman, Mrs. Dr. dear, I would have been meek and humble. It is my opinion that this Sophia of Greece is a minx.”

  Susan was furious when the news came that Venizelos had met with defeat. “I could spank Constantine and skin him alive afterwards, that I could,” she exclaimed bitterly.

  “Oh, Susan, I’m surprised at you,” said the doctor, pulling a long face. “Have you no regard for the proprieties? Skin him alive by all means but omit the spanking.”

  “If he had been well spanked in his younger days he might have more sense now,” retorted Susan. “But I suppose princes are never spanked, more is the pity. I see the Allies have sent him an ultimatum. I could tell them that it will take more than ultimatums to skin a snake like Constantine. Perhaps the Allied blockade will hammer sense into his head; but that will take some time I am thinking, and in the meantime what is to become of poor Serbia?”

  They saw what became of Serbia, and during the process Susan was hardly to be lived with. In her exasperation she abused everything and everybody except Kitchener, and she fell upon poor President Wilson tooth and claw.

  “If he had done his duty and gone into the war long ago we should not have seen this mess in Serbia,” she avowed.

  “It would be a serious thing to plunge a great country like the United States, with its mixed population, into the war, Susan,” said the doctor, who sometimes came to the defence of the President, not because he thought Wilson needed it especially, but from an unholy love of baiting Susan.

  “Maybe, doctor dear—maybe! But that makes me think of the old story of the girl who told her grandmother she was going to be married. ‘It is a solemn thing to be married,’ said the old lady. ‘Yes, but it is a solemner thing not to be,’ said the girl. And I can testify to that out of my own experience, doctor dear. And I think it is a solemner thing for the Yankees that they have kept out of the war than it would have been if they had gone into it. However, though I do not know much about them, I am of the opinion that we will see them starting something yet, Woodrow Wilson or no Woodrow Wilson, when they get it into their heads that this war is not a correspondence school. They will not,” said Susan, energetically waving a saucepan with one hand and a soup ladle with the other, “be too proud to fight then.”

  On a pale-yellow, windy evening in October Carl Meredith went away. He had enlisted on his eighteenth birthday. John Meredith saw him off with a set face. His two boys were gone—there was only little Bruce left now. He loved Bruce and Bruce’s mother dearly; but Jerry and Carl were the sons of the bride of his youth and Carl was the only one of all his children who had Cecilia’s very eyes. As they looked lovingly out at him above Carl’s uniform the pale minister suddenly remembered the day when for the first and last time he had tried to whip Carl for his prank with the eel. That was the first time he had realised how much Carl’s eyes were like Cecilia’s. Now he realised it again once more. Would he ever again see his dead wife’s eyes looking at him from his son’s face? What a bonny, clean, handsome lad he was! It was—hard—to see him go. John Meredith seemed to be looking at a torn plain strewed with the bodies of “able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five.” Only the other day Carl had been a little scrap of a boy, hunting bugs in Rainbow Valley, taking lizards to bed with him, and scandalizing the Glen by carrying frogs to Sunday School. It seemed hardly—right—somehow that he should be an “able-bodied man” in khaki. Yet John Meredith had said no word to dissuade him when Carl had told him he must go.