That was the first time he had realised how much Carl's eyes
were like Cecilia's. Now he realised it again once more. Would he ever
again see his dead wife's eyes looking at him from his son's face? What
a bonny, clean, handsome lad he was! It was--hard--to see him go. John
Meredith seemed to be looking at a torn plain strewed with the bodies of
"able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five." Only the
other day Carl had been a little scrap of a boy, hunting bugs in Rainbow
Valley, taking lizards to bed with him, and scandalizing the Glen by
carrying frogs to Sunday School. It seemed hardly--right--somehow that
he should be an "able-bodied man" in khaki. Yet John Meredith had said
no word to dissuade him when Carl had told him he must go.
Rilla felt Carl's going keenly. They had always been cronies and
playmates. He was only a little older than she was and they had been
children in Rainbow Valley together. She recalled all their old pranks
and escapades as she walked slowly home alone. The full moon peeped
through the scudding clouds with sudden floods of weird illumination,
the telephone wires sang a shrill weird song in the wind, and the tall
spikes of withered, grey-headed golden-rod in the fence corners swayed
and beckoned wildly to her like groups of old witches weaving unholy
spells. On such a night as this, long ago, Carl would come over to
Ingleside and whistle her out to the gate.
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