Jed slowly shook his head.  “I—­I don’t know,” he groaned.  “I dasn’t believe—­ There, there!  That’s enough of my tricks.  How’s Petunia’s hair curlin’ this mornin’?”

After the child left him he tried to prepare his dinner, but it was as unsatisfactory a meal as breakfast had been.  He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t work.  He could only think, and thinking meant alternate periods of delirious hope and black depression.  He sat down before the little table in his living-room and, opening the drawer, saw Ruth Armstrong’s pictured face looking up at him.

“Jed!  Oh, Jed!”

It was Maud Hunniwell’s voice.  She had entered the shop and the living-room without his hearing her and now she was standing behind him with her hand upon his shoulder.  He started, turned and looked up into her face.  And one glance caused him to forget himself and even the pictured face in the drawer for the time and to think only of her.

“Maud!” he exclaimed.  “Maud!”

Her hair, usually so carefully arranged, was disordered; her hat was not adjusted at its usual exact angle; and as for the silver fox, it hung limply backside front.  Her eyes were red and she held a handkerchief in one hand and a letter in the other.

“Oh, Jed!” she cried.

Jed put out his hands.  “There, there, Maud!” he said.  “There, there, little girl.”

They had been confidants since her babyhood, these two.  She came to him now, and putting her head upon his shoulder, burst into a storm of weeping.  Jed stroked her hair.

“There, there, Maud,” he said gently.  “Don’t, girlie, don’t.  It’s goin’ to be all right, I know it. . . .  And so you came to me, did you?  I’m awful glad you did, I am so.”

“He asked me to come,” she sobbed.  “He wrote it—­in—­in the letter.”

Jed led her over to a chair.  “Sit down, girlie,” he said, “and tell me all about it.  You got the letter, then?”

She nodded.  “Yes,” she said, chokingly; “it—­it just came.  Oh, I am so glad Father did not come home to dinner to-day.  He would have—­have seen me and—­and—­oh, why did he do it, Jed?  Why?”

Jed shook his head.  “He had to do it, Maud,” he answered.  “He wanted to do the right thing and the honorable thing.  And you would rather have had him do that, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh—­oh, I don’t know.  But why didn’t he come to me and tell me?  Why did he go away and—­and write me he had gone to enlist?  Why didn’t he come to me first?  Oh. . . .  Oh, Jed, how could he treat me so?”

She was sobbing again.  Jed took her hand and patted it with his own big one.

“Didn’t he tell you in the letter why?” he asked.

“Yes—­yes, but—­”

“Then let me tell you what he told me, Maud.  He and I talked for up’ards of three solid hours last night and I cal’late I understood him pretty well when he finished.  Now let me tell you what he said to me.”