It's queer what a way Doctor Wynne has of stepping abruptly into my life and out again. It's been so ever since I found his picture in the barrel. A few days after Richard left he unexpectedly opened the front gate and came up to the porch where Tippy and I sat knitting. I did not recognize him at first in his captain's uniform, and no one could have been further from my thoughts. I supposed he had already sailed for France.

Some business with old Mr. Carver, who is giving an ambulance to the Red Cross, brought him to Provincetown, and, happening to hear that Miss Susan Triplett was at our house, he came up to say goodbye to her before starting to join the unit to which he's been assigned. He was disappointed when he found that Miss Susan had gone back to Wellfleet. He said she was one of the few people left who had known his family intimately, and who remembered him as a child. It gave him a sense of kinship to have her call him "Johnny" in a world where everyone else said "Doctor."

That was enough for Tippy. In her opinion any man in khaki is entitled to all the "sugar and spice and everything nice" the world can give. When she found that he has no home ties now, she adopted him on the spot. He didn't know he was being adopted, but I did, just from the positive tone of her voice. She told him her claim on him was about as old as Susan's. She'd known him when he was a bald-headed baby—held him in her arms in this very house, and sat under his father's preaching many a time in Wellfleet. And indeed he'd stay to supper. He needn't think she'd let a son of Sister Wynne's leave the house without breaking bread with her, especially when he was starting off to a far country where he was liable to get nothing but husks.

If what Tippy wanted was to give him a little slice of home to pack up and take away in his "old kit bag," she certainly succeeded. It will be many a moon before he can forget the table she spread for him, the advice she gave him and the sock she hurried to "toe off" in order that there might be a full half dozen in the package she thrust upon him at parting. An own aunt could not have been more solicitous for his comfort, and she did all but call him Johnny.

It's the first time I ever had any conversation with him more than a sentence or two. Now as he "reminisced" with Tippy, and told experiences of his boyhood on a Western farm and of his medical student days, I saw that the real John Wynne was not the person I imagined him to be.

What a sentimental little goose I must have been at sixteen; truly "green in judgment" to have woven such a fabric of dreams around him. Miss Crewes' story started it, putting him on a sort of pedestal, and the affair with Esther added to it, till I imagined him a romantic and knightly figure, "wrapped in the solitude" of a sad and patient melancholy. The real John Wynne is a busy, matter-of-fact physician, absorbingly interested in the war and keen to be into it, also ready to talk about anything from "cabbages to kings." Yet I suppose if anyone had told me then that I was mistaken in that early estimate of him I would have resented it. I wanted him to fit the role I assigned him. It made him more interesting to my callow mind to imagine him like that king in the poem when,—"The barque which held the prince went down he never smiled again."

He was so warmly interested in my account of finding his picture at that auction and keeping it all these years, that I took him across the hall to look at it. The thought came to me that maybe he'd like to have it, but when I offered it to him he said no, he had a more recent one of his mother, one more like her as he remembered her. He stood looking at it a long while and finally said it seemed so much at home there on the wall that he hoped I'd keep it there. It would sort of anchor him to the old Cape to look back and know that it was hanging in the very room where they had once been together. Then he added almost wistfully:

"If she were here to wish me Godspeed, I could go away better equipped, perhaps, for what lies ahead."

Some sudden impulse prompted me to open the table drawer and take out the little service flag with the one star which I had thrust in there when I put up the new one. As I hung it under the picture I was surprised to hear myself saying, "See! She does wish you Godspeed."

It was exactly as if someone else put the words into my mouth, for I had never thought of them before, and I'm sure I never quoted Scripture that way before, outside of Sunday school. It gave me the queerest sensation to be doing it as if some force outside of myself were impelling me to speak.

"Don't you suppose," I said slowly, "that if God so loved the world that He could give His only son to die for it, that he must know how human fathers and mothers feel when they do the same thing? Don't you believe that He'd let a mother, even up in heaven, have some way to comfort and help a son who was offering his life to save the world? The men in the trenches can't see the stars we hang out for them here at home, but they feel our spirit of helpfulness flowing out to them. How do we know that the windows of heaven are not hung with stars that mean the same thing? How do we know but what those who watch and wait for us up there are not aiding us in ways greater than we dream possible? Helping us as Israel was helped, by the invisible hosts and chariots of fire, in the mountain round about Elisha?"

The tenderest smile lit up his face. "It's strange you should have hit upon that particular story," he said. "It was one of my mother's favorites. She began telling it to me when I was no bigger than that little chap there, leaning against her shoulder."

Then he turned and held out his hand, saying, "You've given me more than you can ever know, Miss Huntingdon. Thank you for hanging that little service star there. She does say Godspeed, and its help will go with me overseas."

A little while later he went away, and I've wondered a dozen times since what made me say that to him.

The month of July in my 1917 calendar is a motley page, the first half of it being marked with a perfect jumble of red rings and black crosses. They stand for all that happened between my home-coming after Commencement and Richard's goodbye. When you consider that into one day alone was crowded my birthday anniversary, Babe's wedding, Aunt Elspeth's death, and the greatest experience of my life, it's no wonder that in looking back over it all July seems almost as long and eventful as all the years which went before it.

There is a triple ring around the twenty-seventh. I couldn't make it red enough, for that is the joyful day that Richard's cablegram came, saying that he was safe in England. It was also the day that Babe came home from her honeymoon, alone, of course. Watson joined his ship two days after they left here, and she visited his people the rest of the time. I've not marked that event but I'll not forget it soon, because she was so provoking when I ran in to tell her my news. Not that she wasn't interested in hearing of Richard's safety, or that she wasn't enthusiastic about my engagement and my solitaire, but she had such a superior married air, as if the mere fact of her being Mrs. Watson Tucker made all she said and felt important.

She gave me to understand that while it was natural that she should worry about Watson, and almost die of anxiety when the mails were late, I oughtn't to feel the separation as keenly as she, because I was merely engaged.

"My dear, you can't realize the difference until you've had the experience," she said patronizingly. I told her Richard had been a part of my life ever since I was a child, and it stood to reason that he filled a larger place in it than Watson could in hers, having only come into it recently.

It's no use arguing with Babe. You never get anywhere. So I just looked down on my little ring of pirate gold and felt sorry for her. She has no link like that to remind her of such buried treasure as Richard and I share—the memory of all those years when we were growing up together.

Early in August I had the joy of putting a big red capital L on my calendar, to mark the day that Richard's first letter came. He was well, he had had a comfortable crossing, he had passed all his tests and begun his special training for the coast patrol. It is almost worth the separation to have a letter like that. Not only did he tell me right out in the dearest way how much he cares for me, regardless of the censor's possible embarrassment, but every line showed his buoyant spirits over the chance that has come to him at last. He has wanted it so desperately, tried for it so gallantly and worked and waited so patiently that I would be a selfish pig not to be glad too, and I am glad.

Judith asked how I had the heart to go into the tableaux that Mrs. Tupman is getting up for the Yarn fund. She was sure she couldn't if she were in my place. She'd be thinking all the time of the danger he is in. She wondered if I realized that the elements themselves conspire against an aviator—fire, earth and even water, if he's in the naval force, to say nothing of the risk of the enemy's guns.

She couldn't understand it when I said I wasn't going to make myself miserable thinking of such things. And I'm not. He's having his heart's desire at last, and I'm so happy for him that I won't let myself be sorry for me.

His next letter was written five thousand feet up in the air. He went to twenty thousand feet that trip, but couldn't write at such a height, because his hand got so cold he had to put his glove on. Of course it was only a short scribbled note, but it thrilled me to the core to have one written under such circumstances.

In the postscript, added after landing, he said, "I never go up without wishing you could share with me the amazing sensations of such a flight. You would love the diving and twirling and swooping. You were always such a good little sport I don't like to have you left out of the game. Never mind, we'll have a flier of our own when I come back, and we'll go up every day. We had an exciting chase after some enemy planes the other day. We sent down one raiding Boche and came near getting winged ourselves. I wish I might tell you the important particulars, but the things which would interest you most are the very ones we are not at liberty to write about. All I can say is that life over here now is one perpetual thrill, and it's a source of constant thanksgiving to me that Fate landed me in this branch of the service instead of the one I was headed for when I skipped off to Canada."

Even Richard's reference to the enemy planes which came near winging them did not fill me with uneasiness, because all his life he's gone through accidents unscathed. Once when he was only half-grown he brought his sailboat safely into port through a squall which crippled it, and old Captain Ames declared if it had been any other boy alongshore he'd have been drowned. That for level head and steady nerve he'd never seen his beat. Even back in the days when his crazy stunts in bicycle riding made the town's hair stand on end, he never had a bad fall. So I didn't worry when two weeks went by without bringing further word from him. But when three passed and then a whole month, I began to get anxious. Now that it's beginning on the second month, I'm awfully worried.