t like this before.

In a few minutes Jims was sound asleep; and, as Rilla listened to his
soft, regular breathing and felt the little body warm and contented
against her, she realized that--at last--she loved her war-baby.

"He has got to be--such--a--darling," she thought drowsily, as she
drifted off to slumberland herself.

In February Jem and Jerry and Robert Grant were in the trenches and a
little more tension and dread was added to the Ingleside life. In March
"Yiprez," as Susan called it, had come to have a bitter significance.
The daily list of casualties had begun to appear in the papers and no
one at Ingleside ever answered the telephone without a horrible cold
shrinking--for it might be the station-master phoning up to say a
telegram had come from overseas. No one at Ingleside ever got up in the
morning without a sudden piercing wonder over what the day might bring.

"And I used to welcome the mornings so," thought Rilla.

Yet the round of life and duty went steadily on and every week or so
one of the Glen lads who had just the other day been a rollicking
schoolboy went into khaki.

"It is bitter cold out tonight, Mrs. Dr. dear," said Susan, coming in
out of the clear starlit crispness of the Canadian winter twilight. "I
wonder if the boys in the trenches are warm."

"How everything comes back to this war," cried Gertrude Oliver. "We
can't get away from it--not even when we talk of the weather. I never
go out these dark cold nights myself without thinking of the men in the
trenches--not only our men but everybody's men. I would feel the same
if there were nobody I knew at the front. When I snuggle down in my
comfortable bed I am ashamed of being comfortable. It seems as if it
were wicked of me to be so when many are not."

"I saw Mrs. Meredith down at the store," said Susan, "and she tells me
that they are really troubled over Bruce, he takes things so much to
heart. He has cried himself to sleep for a week, over the starving
Belgians. 'Oh, mother,' he will say to her, so beseeching-like, 'surely
the babies are never hungry--oh, not the babies, mother! Just say the
babies are not hungry, mother.' And she cannot say it because it would
not be true, and she is at her wits' end. They try to keep such things
from him but he finds them out and then they cannot comfort him. It
breaks my heart to read about them myself, Mrs. Dr. dear, and I cannot
console myself with the thought that the tales are not true.