This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
A WAR WEDDING
205

laugh. I really felt sorry for Miranda who is as much in love with Joe as a china-blue girl can be with any one and who is dreadfully ashamed of her father’s pro-German sentiments. I think she understood that I did, for she said she had wanted to tell me all about her worries because I had grown so sympathetic this past year. I wonder if I have. I know I used to be a selfish, thoughtless creature—how selfish and thoughtless I am ashamed to remember now, so I can’t be quite so bad as I was.

“I wish I could help Miranda. It would be very romantic to contrive a war wedding and I should dearly love to get the better of Whiskers-on-the-moon. But at present the oracle has not spoken.”

CHAPTER XVIII
A War Wedding

I CAN tell you this Dr. dear,” said Susan, pale with wrath, “that Germany is getting to be perfectly ridiculous.”

They were all in the big Ingleside kitchen. Susan was mixing biscuits for supper. Mrs. Blythe was making short-bread for Jem and Rilla was compounding candy for Ken and Walter—it had once been “Walter and Ken” in her thoughts but somehow, quite unconsciously, this had changed until Ken’s name came naturally first. Cousin Sophia was also there, knitting. All the boys were going to be killed