When she had
wound the kitchen clock and put Dr. Jekyll out, none too gently, she
stood for a little while on the doorstep, looking down the Glen, which
lay tranced in faint, silvery light from a sinking young moon. But Susan
did not see the familiar hills and harbour. She was looking at the
aviation camp in Kingsport where Shirley was that night.
"He called me 'Mother Susan,'" she was thinking. "Well, all our men folk
have gone now--Jem and Walter and Shirley and Jerry and Carl. And none
of them had to be driven to it. So we have a right to be proud. But
pride--" Susan sighed bitterly--"pride is cold company and that there
is no gainsaying."
The moon sank lower into a black cloud in the west, the Glen went out in
an eclipse of sudden shadow--and thousands of miles away the Canadian
boys in khaki--the living and the dead--were in possession of Vimy
Ridge.
Vimy Ridge is a name written in crimson and gold on the Canadian annals
of the Great War. "The British couldn't take it and the French couldn't
take it," said a German prisoner to his captors, "but you Canadians are
such fools that you don't know when a place can't be taken!"
So the "fools" took it--and paid the price.
Jerry Meredith was seriously wounded at Vimy Ridge--shot in the back,
the telegram said.
"Poor Nan," said Mrs. Blythe, when the news came. She thought of her own
happy girlhood at old Green Gables.
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