If the weather holds, she will come back all the sooner.) “It would be heaven now to get one breath of mountain air. Could you find your way back to our place in the valley again?” (Yes, even if I were blind, he thought.) “Will you promise to look after your hand until it gets well? I worried so after you had gone, because I forgot to change the bandage yesterday. Daddy was glad to see me: he said he was not going to let me go again but, don’t worry, I’ll have my own way in the end. I always do. I don’t know any one at home any more— all of the boys have enlisted or gone to work in the shipyards at Norfolk. Most of the girls I know are getting married, or married already. That leaves only the kids.” (He winced. As old as I am, maybe older.) "Give my love to Mrs. Barton, and tell your mother I said she must not work so hard in that hot kitchen. And all the little cross-marks at the bottom are for you. Try to guess what they are.
LAURA."
He read her prosy letter with rigid face, devouring the words more hungrily than if they had been lyrical song. She would come back! She would come back! Soon.
There was another page. Weakened and relaxed from his excitement, he looked at it. There he found, almost illegibly written, but at last in her own speech, as if leaping out from the careful aimlessness of her letter, this note:
"July 4.
“Richard came yesterday. He is twenty-five, works in Norfolk. I’ve been engaged to him almost a year. We’re going off quietly to Norfolk to-morrow and get married. My dear! My dear! I couldn’t tell you! I tried to, but couldn’t. I didn’t want to lie. Everything else was true. I meant all I said. If you hadn’t been so young, but what’s the use of saying that? Try to forgive me, but please don’t forget me. Good-by and God bless you. Oh, my darling, it was heaven! I shall never forget you.”
When he had finished the letter, he re-read it, slowly and carefully. Then he folded it, put it in his inner breast-pocket, and
