“Do you suppose it would have been war if God 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 onto 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 shall never marry any one
else.  But the man I marry must love his country first of all, and
be able to say to me,

“’I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.’

“There is no honor above America with me.  In this great hour there
is no other honor.