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 , that they would never marry each other . Alice Clow had `` crossed out '' their names on her slate in school that day , and it came out that `` both married . '' They did not like the idea at all , hence the mutual vow in Rainbow Valley . There was nothing like an ounce of prevention . Rilla laughed over the old memory -- and then sighed .
That very day a dispatch XXXXX some London paper had contained the cheerful announcement that `` the present moment is the darkest since the war began . ''
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