Chapter 10 - Page 2

"Teddy will feel sold when he sees how I
have altered that."

"Presently we shall see his name in a list of prisoners," she said. "He
is a wounded prisoner in Germany."

She adopted that story. She had no justification for it, but she would
hear no doubts upon it. She presently began to prepare parcels to send
him. "They want almost everything," she told people. "They are treated
abominably. He has not been able to write to me yet, but I do not think
I ought to wait until he asks me."

Cissie was afraid to interfere with this.

After a time Letty grew impatient at the delay in getting any address
and took her first parcel to the post office.

"Unless you know what prison he is at," said the postmistress.

"Pity!" said Letty. "I don't know that. Must it wait for that? I
thought the Germans were so systematic that it didn't matter."

The postmistress made tedious explanations that Letty did not seem to
hear. She stared straight in front of her at nothing. Then in a pause in
the conversation she picked up her parcel.

"It's tiresome for him to have to wait," she said. "But it can't be long
before I know."

She took the parcel back to the cottage.

"After all," she said, "it gives us time to get the better sort of
throat lozenges for him--the sort the syndicate shop doesn't keep."

She put the parcel conspicuously upon the dresser in the kitchen where
it was most in the way, and set herself to make a jersey for Teddy
against the coming of the cold weather.

But one night the white mask fell for a moment from her face.

Cissie and she had been sitting in silence before the fire. She had been
knitting--she knitted very badly--and Cissie had been pretending to
read, and had been watching her furtively. Cissie eyed the slow,
toilsome growth of the slack woolwork for a time, and the touch of angry
effort in every stroke of the knitting needles. Then she was stirred to
remonstrance.

"Poor Letty!" she said very softly. "Suppose after all, he is dead?"

Letty met her with a pitiless stare.

"He is a prisoner," she said. "Isn't that enough? Why do you jab at me
by saying that? A wounded prisoner. Isn't that enough despicable
trickery for God even to play on Teddy--our Teddy? To the very last
moment he shall not be dead. Until the war is over. Until six months
after the war....

"I will tell you why, Cissie...."

She leant across the table and pointed her remarks with her knitting
needles, speaking in a tone of reasonable remonstrance. "You see," she
said, "if