She winced, and he laughed.  “You’re not the bold soldier-girl of yesterday!” Then he sobered.  “If anything happens, I want you to help my mother out.  She won’t like my doing this thing.  She brought me up to think war a fool thing as well as a bad thing.  My father was in the Civil War; all through it; lost his arm in it.”  She thrilled with the sense of the arm round her; what if that should be lost?  He laughed as if divining her:  “Oh, it doesn’t run in the family, as far as I know!” Then he added, gravely:  “He came home with misgivings about war, and they grew on him.  I guess he and mother agreed between them that I was to be brought up in his final mind about it; but that was before my time.  I only knew him from my mother’s report of him and his opinions; I don’t know whether they were hers first; but they were hers last.  This will be a blow to her.  I shall have to write and tell her—­”

He stopped, and she asked:  “Would you like me to write, too, George?”

“I don’t believe that would do.  No, I’ll do the writing.  She’ll understand a little if I say that I thought the way to minimize it was to make war on the largest possible scale at once—­that I felt I must have been helping on the war somehow if I hadn’t helped keep it from coming, and I knew I hadn’t; when it came, I had no right to stay out of it.”

Whether his sophistries satisfied him or not, they satisfied her.  She clung to his breast, and whispered, with closed eyes and quivering lips:  “Yes, yes, yes!”

“But if anything should happen, you might go to her and see what you could do for her.  You know?  It’s rather far off; she can’t leave her chair—­”

“Oh, I’ll go, if it’s the ends of the earth!  But nothing will happen!  Nothing can!  I—­”

She felt herself lifted with his rising, and Gearson was saying, with his arm still round her, to her father:  “Well, we’re off at once, Mr. Balcom.  We’re to be formally accepted at the capital, and then bunched up with the rest somehow, and sent into camp somewhere, and got to the front as soon as possible.  We all want to be in the van, of course; we’re the first company to report to the Governor.  I came to tell Editha, but I hadn’t got round to it.”

* * * * *

She saw him again for a moment at the capital, in the station, just before the train started southward with his regiment.  He looked well, in his uniform, and very soldierly, but somehow girlish, too, with his clean-shaven face and slim figure.  The manly eyes and the strong voice satisfied her, and his preoccupation with some unexpected details of duty flattered her.  Other girls were weeping and bemoaning themselves, but she felt a sort of noble distinction in the abstraction, the almost unconsciousness, with which they parted.  Only at the last moment he said:  “Don’t forget my mother.  It mayn’t be such a walk-over as I supposed,” and he laughed at the notion.