As the war drags on, Rilla matures, organizing the Junior Red Cross in her village. While collecting donations for the war effort, she comes across a house where a young mother has just died with her husband away at war, leaving no one to care for her two-week-old son. Rilla takes the sickly little boy back to Ingleside in a soup tureen, naming him "James Kitchener Anderson" after his father and Herbert Kitchener, British Secretary of State for War. Rilla's father Gilbert challenges her to raise the war orphan, and although she doesn't like babies at all, she rises to the occasion, eventually coming to love "Jims" as her own. She also assists in the elopement of a soldier whose beloved is the daughter of the town's only vocal pacifist; the pacifist's attempts to oppose fund-raising for the war effort or to criticize the war while leading prayers are a recurring minor storyline.