Rachel Ellis picked up the half knitted Red Cross mitten in her lap. “Well, I don't know whether he's right or you are, Cap'n Lote,” she said, with a sigh, “but this I do know--I wish this awful war was over and he was back home again.”
That remark ended the conversation. Olive resumed her own knitting, seeing it but indistinctly. Her husband did not continue his newspaper reading. Instead he rose and, saying something about cal'latin' he would go for a little walk before turning in, went out into the yard.
But the war did not end, it went on; so too did the enlisting and training. In the early summer Albert came home for a two days' leave. He was broader and straighter and browner. His uniform became him and, more than ever, the eyes of South Harniss's youthful femininity, native or imported, followed him as he walked the village streets. But the glances were not returned, not in kind, that is. The new Fosdick home, although completed, was not occupied. Mrs. Fosdick had, that summer, decided that her duties as mover in goodness knows how many war work activities prevented her taking her “usual summer rest.” Instead she and Madeline occupied a rented villa at Greenwich, Connecticut, coming into town for meetings of all sorts. Captain Zelotes had his own suspicions as to whether war work alone was the cause of the Fosdicks' shunning of what was to have been their summer home, but he kept those suspicions to himself. Albert may have suspected also, but he, too, said nothing. The censored correspondence between Greenwich and the training camp traveled regularly, and South Harniss damsels looked and longed in vain. He saw them, he bowed to them, he even addressed them pleasantly and charmingly, but to him they were merely incidents in his walks to and from the post-office. In his mind's eye he saw but one, and she, alas, was not present in the flesh.
Then he returned to the camp where, later on, Captain Zelotes and Olive visited him. As they came away the captain and his grandson exchanged a few significant words.
“It is likely to be almost any time, Grandfather,” said Albert, quietly. “They are beginning to send them now, as you know by the papers, and we have had the tip that our turn will be soon. So--”