“I shouldn’t wonder if she did,” agreed the captain, nodding.

* * * * *

CHAPTER IX

Lanse stood in the kitchen door, lunch-pail in hand.  It lacked ten minutes of seven of a June morning; therefore he wore his working clothes.  He glanced down at them now with an expression of extreme distaste, then from Celia to Charlotte, both of whom wore fresh print dresses covered with the trim pinafore aprons which were Celia’s pride.

“When this siege is over,” he remarked, “maybe I won’t appreciate the privilege of wearing clean linen from morning till night every day in the week.”

“Poor old Lanse!” said Celia, with compassion.  “That’s been the part that has tried your soul, hasn’t it!  You haven’t minded the work, but the dirt——­”

“I hope I’m not a Nancy, either,” Lanse went on.  “I’m sure I don’t feel that my wonderful dignity is compromised by my occupation.  Better men than I soil their hands to more purpose every day, but—­well, I must be off.”

He departed abruptly, leaving Celia standing in the door to wave a hand to him as he turned the corner.

“John Lansing is tired,” she said to Charlotte, sisterly sympathy in her voice.  “I don’t think we’ve half appreciated what all these months in the shops have meant to him.  It isn’t as if he were training for one of the engineering specialties, and were interested in his work as practical education in his own line.  He’ll never have the least use for anything he’s learning now.”

“He may,” Charlotte suggested.  “He may marry a girl who will want him to do odd jobs about the house.  A mechanic in the family is an awfully desirable thing.  Mrs. Fields says there’s nothing Doctor Churchill can’t do in the way of repairing; and when I told that to Uncle Ray he said that all good surgeons needed to be born mechanics, and usually were.  And even though Lanse makes a lawyer, like father, he may need to get out of the automobile he’ll have some day, and crawl under it and make it over inside before he can go on.”

Celia laughed, and went to call the rest of the family from their beds, early hours having now perforce become the habit of the Birch family.

It was some three hours later that Charlotte sat down for a moment to rest on the little vine-covered back porch.  The breakfast work and the bed-making were over, the kitchen was in order, and there was time to draw breath before plunging into the next set of duties.

Celia had gone up-stairs to some summer sewing she had on hand; Captain Rayburn had taken the baby around the corner to a pretty park, where the two spent long hours now, in the perfect June weather; the boys were at school, and the house was very still.

Charlotte stretched her arms above her head, drawing a long breath.

“How long ago it seems that I was free after breakfast to do what I wanted to!” she said to herself.  “And how little I realised all the cares that were always on mother!  Oh, if it were only time for them to come back—­this day—­this hour—­this minute!  I wouldn’t mind the work now, if they were only here.”