I wish I could write first, "The Seven Darlings lived happily ever
afterward," and then the word "Finis." But I cannot end so easily and
maintain a reputation for veracity. They can't have lived happily
afterward until they are dead--can they? At the moment they have just
closed The Camp after the summer and scattered to their winter homes;
that is, all of them except Gay.
The Camp, of course, is no longer an inn. They run it on joint account
for themselves and for their friends. And they have delightful times.
Colonel Meredith has built a tremendous house on his ancestral acres,
and during the winter Arthur and his wife, the Herrings, the Reniers,
the Jonstones, and the Langhams are apt to make it their headquarters.
Gay and her young man were to have visited the Merediths this winter.
There was going to be a united family effort to discover the buried
silver which Mr. Bob Jonstone sold to his cousin, but of course the
great war has upset this excellent plan, together with a good many
million other plans, even more excellent and important.
The Earl of Merrivale is fighting somewhere in the wet ditches--Gay
doesn't know exactly where. She herself, a red cross on her sleeve, is
with one of the field-hospitals, working like a slave to save life.
Because her husband is an Englishman, she didn't think that she could
ever be kind to a German or an Austrian, but that turned out to be a
whopping big error of judgment. They all look alike to her now, and her
heart almost breaks over them. But I don't know what will become of her
if anything happens to Merrivale. I think poor little Gay would just
curl up and die. He is all the world to her, just as she is to him.
Well, they are only one loving couple out of a good many hundred
thousands. The times are too momentous to follow them further or waste
words and sympathy on them. The world is thinking in big figures, not in
units.
Only a sentimentalist here and there regards as more important than
empire and riches the little love-affairs that death is hourly ending,
and the little babies who are never to be born.