"be too proud to fight then."

On a pale-yellow, windy evening in October Carl Meredith went away. He
had enlisted on his eighteenth birthday. John Meredith saw him off with
a set face. His two boys were gone--there was only little Bruce left
now. He loved Bruce and Bruce's mother dearly; but Jerry and Carl were
the sons of the bride of his youth and Carl was the only one of all his
children who had Cecilia's very eyes. As they looked lovingly out at
him above Carl's uniform the pale minister suddenly remembered the day
when for the first and last time he had tried to whip Carl for his
prank with the eel. That was the first time he had realised how much
Carl's eyes were like Cecilia's. Now he realised it again once more.
Would he ever again see his dead wife's eyes looking at him from his
son's face? What a bonny, clean, handsome lad he was! It was--hard--to
see him go. John Meredith seemed to be looking at a torn plain strewed
with the bodies of "able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and
forty-five." Only the other day Carl had been a little scrap of a boy,
hunting bugs in Rainbow Valley, taking lizards to bed with him, and
scandalizing the Glen by carrying frogs to Sunday School. It seemed
hardly--right--somehow that he should be an "able-bodied man" in khaki.
Yet John Meredith had said no word to dissuade him when Carl had told
him he must go.

Rilla felt Carl's going keenly. They had always been cronies and
playmates. He was only a little older than she was and they had been
children in Rainbow Valley together. She recalled all their old pranks
and escapades as she walked slowly home alone. The full moon peeped
through the scudding clouds with sudden floods of weird illumination,
the telephone wires sang a shrill weird song in the wind, and the tall
spikes of withered, grey-headed golden-rod in the fence corners swayed
and beckoned wildly to her like groups of old witches weaving unholy
spells. On such a night as this, long ago, Carl would come over to
Ingleside and whistle her out to the gate. "Let's go on a moon-spree,
Rilla," he would say, and the two of them would scamper off to Rainbow
Valley. Rilla had never been afraid of his beetles and bugs, though she
drew a hard and fast line at snakes. They used to talk together of
almost everything and were teased about each other at school; but one
evening when they were about ten years of age they had solemnly
promised, by the old spring in Rainbow Valley, tha