He put his arm through hers silently and they went together down the moonlit road . The frogs were singing in the marshes , the dim , ensilvered fields of home lay all around them . The spring night was lovely and appealing . Rilla felt that its beauty was an insult to her pain . She would hate moonlight for ever . `` You know ? '' said Walter . `` Yes . Irene told me , '' answered Rilla chokingly . `` We did n't want you to know till the evening was over . I knew when you came out for the drill that you had heard . Little sister , I had to do it . I could n't live any longer on such terms with myself as I have been since the Lusitania was sunk . When I pictured those dead women and children floating about in that pitiless , ice-cold water -- well , at first I just felt a sort of nausea with life . I wanted to get out of the world where such a thing could happen -- shake its accursed dust from my feet for ever . Then I knew I had to go . '' `` There are -- plenty -- without you . '' `` That is n't the point , Rilla-my-Rilla . I 'm going for my own sake -- to save my soul alive . It will shrink to something small and mean and lifeless if I do n't go .
That would be worse than blindness or mutilation or any XXXXX the things I 've feared . ''
as if in of on since that through to with