"
"The Russians will not be in time to save Paris," said Walter gloomily.
"Paris is the heart of France--and the road to it is open. Oh, I wish"
--he stopped abruptly and went out.
After a paralysed day the Ingleside folk found it was possible to "carry
on" even in the face of ever-darkening bad news. Susan worked fiercely
in her kitchen, the doctor went out on his round of visits, Nan and Di
returned to their Red Cross activities; Mrs. Blythe went to
Charlottetown to attend a Red Cross Convention; Rilla after relieving
her feelings by a stormy fit of tears in Rainbow Valley and an outburst
in her diary, remembered that she had elected to be brave and heroic.
And, she thought, it really was heroic to volunteer to drive about the
Glen and Four Winds one day, collecting promised Red Cross supplies with
Abner Crawford's old grey horse. One of the Ingleside horses was lame
and the doctor needed the other, so there was nothing for it but the
Crawford nag, a placid, unhasting, thick-skinned creature with an
amiable habit of stopping every few yards to kick a fly off one leg with
the foot of the other. Rilla felt that this, coupled with the fact that
the Germans were only fifty miles from Paris, was hardly to be endured.
But she started off gallantly on an errand fraught with amazing results.
Late in the afternoon she found herself, with a buggy full of parcels,
at the entrance to a grassy, deep-rutted lane leading to the harbour
shore, wondering whether it was worth while to call down at the Anderson
house.
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