“Please don’t joke, Doctor.  I am troubled about these dear people.  I talked to Mr. Rivers about it, and he is troubled and says it is the mills and money.  I know that, but at the bottom of it all is the war.  Now Aunt Ann is reading the papers again—­I think it is very strange; it’s confusing, Doctor.”

“Here,” reflected the doctor, “is at least one person with some sense.”

She went on, speaking slowly, “Uncle Jim comes home tired.  Aunt Ann eats her dinner and reads, and is in bed by nine.  The house is as melancholy as—­I feel as if I were in a mousetrap—­”

“Why mouse-trap, my dear?”

“It sounds all right.  The mouse is waiting for something awful to happen—­and so am I. Uncle Jim talked of asking people to stay with us.  It’s just to please Aunt Ann.  She said, ’No, James, I don’t want any one.’  He wished to please her.  She really thinks of nothing but the war and Uncle Jim, and when Uncle Jim is away she will spend an hour alone over his maps.  She has—­what do you call it—?”

“Is obsession the word you want?”

“Yes—­that’s it.”

“Now, Leila, neither you nor I nor Mark Rivers can help those two people we love.  Don’t cry, Leila; or cry if it will help you.  When you marry, be sure to ask, ‘what are your politics, Jeremiah?’” His diversion answered his purpose.

“I never would marry a man named Jeremiah.”

“I recommend a well-trained widower.”

“I prefer to attend to my husband’s education myself.  I should like a man who is single-minded when I marry him.”

“Well, for perversion of English you are quite unequalled.  Go and flirt a bit for relief of mind with Mark Rivers.”

“I would as soon flirt with an undertaker.  Why not with Dr. McGregor?”

“It would be comparable, Leila, to a flirtation between a June rose and a frost-bitten cabbage.  Now, go away.  These people’s fates are on the lap of the gods.”

“Of the god of war, I fear,” said Leila.

“Yes, more or less.”  He sent her away mysteriously relieved, she knew not why.  “A little humour,” he reflected, “is as the Indians say, big medicine.”

Whether the good doctor’s advisory prescription would have served as useful a purpose in the case of Ann Penhallow, he doubted.  That heart-sick little lady was driven swiftly homeward, the sleigh-runners creaking on the frozen snow:  “Walk the horses,” she said to Billy, as they entered the long avenue, “and quit talking.”

While with the doctor and when angrily leaving him, she was the easy victim of a storm of emotions.  As she felt the healthy sting of the dry cold, she began the process of re-adjustment we are wise to practise after a time of passion when by degrees facts and motives begin to reassume more just proportions.  He had said, the war would last long.  That she had not believed.  Could she and James live for years afraid to speak of what was going on?  The fact that her much-loved Maryland did not rise as one man and join the Confederacy had disturbed her with her first doubt as to the final result of the great conflict.  She thought it over with lessening anger at the terrible thing McGregor had said, “You two are drifting apart.”  This sentence kept saying itself over and over.