IX—"MY FIANCEE—SHE ONLY WEPT"
My fiancée was standing in the middle of the yard. Her face had not the same bright gentleness as before. About her features and on her lips there were the same sad and mournful lines that I had seen on the faces of the women in the hospital. She, too, was stamped with the daily silent longing and uncertainty, the nightly dread and heart-ache.
She seemed to me to look old. And she was not yet twenty-two.
She threw her arms round my neck, almost before I had reached the ground. She said nothing. She only cried, clinging closely to me and hiding her face on my shoulder.
"Well, you can recognise him, it seems," said my father. "It was all I could do—just at first...."
She looked at me, and then turned to my father as she said:
"I knew that he would look like that—that was how I always saw him. In my thoughts by day and my dreams at night."
Then we went into the sitting-room.