ning was spoiled; she detested Susan, who had somehow hurt
Walter; and Jem--had Jem been gassed? Had he died in torture?

"I can't endure this suspense any longer," said Rilla desperately.

But she endured it as the others did for another week. Then a letter
came from Jem. He was all right.

"I've come through without a scratch, dad. Don't know how I or any of
us did it. You'll have seen all about it in the papers--I can't write
of it. But the Huns haven't got through--they won't get through. Jerry
was knocked stiff by a shell one time, but it was only the shock. He
was all right in a few days. Grant is safe, too."

Nan had a letter from Jerry Meredith. "I came back to consciousness at
dawn," he wrote. "Couldn't tell what had happened to me but thought
that I was done for. I was all alone and afraid--terribly afraid. Dead
men were all around me, lying on the horrible grey, slimy fields. I was
woefully thirsty--and I thought of David and the Bethlehem water--and
of the old spring in Rainbow Valley under the maples. I seemed to see
it just before me--and you standing laughing on the other side of
it--and I thought it was all over with me. And I didn't care. Honestly,
I didn't care. I just felt a dreadful childish fear of loneliness and
of those dead men around me, and a sort of wonder how this could have
happened to me. Then they found me and carted me off and before long I
discovered that there wasn't really anything wrong with me. I'm going
back to the trenches tomorrow. Every man is needed there that can be
got."

"Laughter is gone out of the world," said Faith Meredith, who had come
over to report on her letters. "I remember telling old Mrs. Taylor long
ago that the world was a world of laughter. But it isn't so any longer."

"It's a shriek of anguish," said Gertrude Oliver.

"We must keep a little laughter, girls," said Mrs. Blythe. "A good
laugh is as good as a prayer sometimes--only sometimes," she added
under her breath. She had found it very hard to laugh during the three
weeks she had just lived through--she, Anne Blythe, to whom laughter
had always come so easily and freshly. And what hurt most was that
Rilla's laughter had grown so rare--Rilla whom she used to think
laughed over-much. Was all the child's girlhood to be so clouded? Yet
how strong and clever and womanly she was growing! How patiently she
knitted and sewed and manipulated those uncertain Junior Reds! And how
wonderful she was with Jims.