had become acquainted. And then on the night before Callendar left, he had been sent for by one of the Americans. He had gone to a dressing station, but Robert was dead when he arrived. He had been wounded while saving one of his own men caught among the barbed wire between the German lines and his own. The man had been saved; he would live. It was he who had told Callendar the whole story, he who in a sort of delirium had described the whole affair with a fantastic poetry . . . the fog that had settled over the lines, the swift, brilliant flare of the Veery lights, the faint, malicious, pop! pop! of the gas shells as they buried their noses so neatly in the earth. It was in this wild, unearthly setting that Robert had given up his life. Robert (thought Hattie) who had said, "There's nothing romantic about war. . . . The side which is the most efficient . . . There won't be any nonsense. . . . I'll look out for myself."
When Ellen had finished they were both silent for a time and at last, Hattie, still dry eyed, said in a firm voice, "It is a judgment . . . I love my children too well . . . better than my own God and now they have been taken from me."
(If only it had been Robert. . . . And now it was Robert too.)
She lay down on the great bed, a strange, incongruous figure—this grim, primitive, black-clad woman—in the midst of all the luxury that Lily had provided. And presently she said, "I'd like to be alone for a time, Ellen. I'll call you . . . later on."
So Ellen left her mother in solitude, but as the door closed behind her she knew that it was herself upon whom the remnants of her family—Hattie and The Everlasting—now depended. It was she who, after all these years in which she had neglected and forgotten them, had become the rock, the foundation. And she knew too that there could no longer be any doubt about marrying Callendar. She would have to marry now . . . Now that Robert, too, was gone there were new reasons. There remained only one thing that she could do for her mother. It might as well be Callendar as any other man.
