“I wonder if I’m different from other girls,” she thought.  “Or is it because I have other things to think about?  Perhaps if I had nothing else on my mind, I’d dream of love as much as anybody, until it amounted to—­what do they call it?—­a fixed idea?—­that thing which comes to people when they keep turning the same thing over and over in their minds, till they can’t get it out of their thoughts?”

But you mustn’t think that Mary didn’t care that Wally was going—­perhaps never to return.  She knew that she liked him—­she knew she would miss him.  And when, just before he left, he sang The Spanish Cavalier in that stirring tenor which always made her scalp tingle and her breast feel full, she turned her face to the moonlit scene outside and lived one of those minutes which are so filled with beauty and the stirring of the spirit that pleasure becomes poignant and brings a feeling which isn’t far from pain.

“I’m off to the war—­to the war I must go,
  To fight for my country and you, dear;
But if I should fall, in vain I would call
  The blessing of my country and you, dear—­”

All their eyes were wet then, even Wally’s—­moved by the sadness of his own song.  Aunt Patty, Aunt Cordelia and Helen wiped their tears away unashamed, but Mary tried to hide hers.

And when the time came for his departure, Aunt Cordelia kissed him and breathed in his ear a prayer, and Aunt Patty kissed him and prayed for him, and Helen kissed him, too, her arms tight around his neck.  But when it came to Mary’s turn, she looked troubled and gazed down at her hand which he was holding in both of his.

“Come on out for a minute,” he whispered, gently leading her.

They went out under the moon.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me, too?” he asked.

Mary thought it over.

“If I kissed you, I would love you,” she said, and tried to hide her tears no more.

He soothed her then in the immemorial manner, and soon she was tranquil again.

“Good-bye, Wally,” she said.

“Good-bye, dear.  You’ll promise to be here when I come back?”

“I shall be here.”

“And you won’t let anybody run away with you until I’ve had another chance?”

“Don’t worry.”

She watched the light of his car diminish until it vanished over the crest of the hill.  A gathering sense of loneliness began to assail her, but with it was a feeling of freedom and purpose—­the feeling that she was being left alone, clear of distraction, to fight her own fight and achieve her own destiny.

Archey Forbes was the next to go.  His going marked a curious incident.

He had applied for a commission in the engineers, and his record and training being good, it wasn’t long before he received the beckoning summons of Mars.

Upon the morning of the day when he was to leave New Bethel, he went to the factory to say good-bye.  The one he wished to see the most, however, was the first one he missed.