CHAPTER VII--ON THE WAY

Tom Cameron came home on a furlough from the officers' training camp the day that the boys of the first draft departed from Cheslow. It stabbed the hearts of many mothers and fathers with a quick pain to see him march through the street so jaunty and debonair.

"Why, Tommy!" his sister cried. "You're a _man!_"

"Lay off! Lay off!" begged her twin, not at all pleased. "You might have awakened to the fact that I was out of rompers some years ago. Your eyesight has been bad."

Indeed, he was rather inclined to ignore her and "flock with his father," as Helen put it to Ruth. The father and son had something in common now that the girl could not altogether understand. They sat before the cold grate in the library, their chairs drawn near to each other, and smoked sometimes for an hour without saying a word.

"But, Ruthie," Helen said, her eyes big and moist, "each seems to know just what the other is thinking about. Sometimes papa says a word, and sometimes Tom; and the other nods and there is perfect understanding. It--it's almost uncanny."

"I think I know what you mean," said the more observant girl of the Red Mill. "We grew up some time ago, Helen. And you know we have rather thought of Tom as a boy, still.

"But he is a man now. There is a difference in the sexes in their attitude to this war which should establish in all our minds that we are not equal."

"Who aren't equal?" demanded Helen, almost wrathfully, for she was a militant feminist.

"Men and women are not equal, dear. And they never will be. Wearing mannish clothes and doing mannish labor will never give women the same outlook upon life that men have. And when men encourage us to believe that our minds are the same as theirs, they do it almost always for their own selfish ends--or because there is something feminine about their minds."

"Traitor!" cried Helen.

"No," sighed Ruth. "Only honesty.

"Tom and his father understand each other's thoughts and feelings as you and your father never could. After all, in the strongest association between father and daughter there is the barrier of sex that cannot be surmounted. You know yourself, Helen, that at a certain point you consider your father much of a big boy and treat him accordingly. That, they tell us, is the 'mother instinct' in the female, and I guess it is.

"On the other hand, I have seen girls and their mothers together (we never had mothers after we were little kiddies, Helen, and we've missed it) but I have seen such perfect understanding and appreciation between mothers and their daughters that it was as though the same soul dwelt in two bodies."

Helen sniffed in mingled scorn and doubt over Ruth's philosophy. Then she said in an aggrieved tone: "But papa and Tom ought not to shut me out of their lives--even in a small way."

"The penalty of being a girl," replied Ruth, practically. "Tom doesn't believe, I suppose, that girls would quite understand his manly feelings," she added with a sudden elfish smile.

"Cat's foot!" ejaculated the twin, with scorn.

Tom Cameron, however, did not run altogether true to form if Ruth was right in her philosophy. He had always been used to talking seriously at times with Ruth, and during this furlough he found time to have a long and confidential talk with the girl of the Red Mill. This might be the only furlough he would have before sailing for France, for he had already obtained his commission as second lieutenant.

There was an understanding between the young man and Ruth Fielding--an unspoken and tacit feeling that they were "made for each other." They were young. Ruth's thoughts had never dwelt much upon love and marriage. She never looked on each man she met half-wonderingly as a possible husband. She had never met any man with this feeling. Perhaps, in part, that was, unconsciously to herself, because Tom had always been so a part of her life and her thoughts. Lately, however, she had come to the realization that if Tom should really ask her to marry him when his education was completed and he was established in the world, the girl of the Red Mill would be very likely to consider his offer seriously.

"Things aren't coming out just as we had planned, Ruth," the young man said on this occasion. "I guess this war is going to knock a lot of plans in the head. If it lasts several years, many of us fellows, if we come through it safely, will feel that we are too old to go back to college.

"Can you imagine a fellow who has spent months in the trenches, and has done the things that the soldiers are having to do and to endure and to learn over there--can you imagine his coming back here and going to school again?"

"Oh, Tom! I suppose that is so. The returned soldier must feel vastly older and more experienced in every way than men who have never heard the bursting of shells and the rattle of machine guns. Oh, dear, Tommy! Are we going to know you at all when you come back?"

"Maybe not," grinned Tom. "I may raise whiskers. Most of the poilus do, I understand. But you could not really imagine a regiment of Uncle Sam's soldiers that were not clean shaven."

"We want to see it all, too--Helen and I," Ruth said, sighing. "We are so far away from the front."

"Goodness!" he exclaimed. "I should think you would be glad."

"But some women must go," Ruth told him gravely. "Why not us?"

"You---- Well, I don't know about you, Ruth. You seem somehow different. I expect you could look out for yourself anywhere. But Helen hasn't got your sense."

"Hear him!" gasped Ruth.

"It's true," he declared doggedly. "She hasn't. Father and I have talked it over. Nell is crazy to go--and I tell father he would be crazy to let her. But it may be that he will go to London and Paris himself, for there is some work he can do for the Government. Of course, Helen would insist upon accompanying him in that event."

"Oh, Tom!" exclaimed Ruth again.

"Why, they'd take you along, of course, if you wanted to go," said Tom.

"But I don't wish to go in any such way," the girl of the Red Mill declared. "I want to go for just one purpose--_to help_. And it must be something worth while. There will be enough dilettante assistants in every branch of the work. My position must mean something to the cause, as well as to me, or I will stay right here in Cheslow."

He looked at her with the old admiration dawning in his eyes.

"Ah! The same old Ruthie, aren't you?" he murmured. "The same independent, ambitious girl, whose work must _count_. Well, I fancy your chance will come. We all seem to be on our way. I wonder to what end?"

There was no sentimental outcome of their talk. After all they were only over the line between boy-and-girlhood and the grown-up state. Tom was too much of a man to wish to anchor a girl to him by any ties when the future was so uncertain. And nothing had really ever happened to them to stir those deeper passions which must rise to the surface when two people talk of love.

They were merely the best of friends. They had no other ties of a warmer nature than those which bound them in friendship to each other. They felt confidence in each other if the future was propitious; but now----

"I am sure you will make your mark in the army, Tom, dear," Ruth said to him. "And I shall think of you--wherever you are and wherever I am--always!"