"News doesn't get from Washington very fast, Cousin James," said Marian, as the family received Major Gordon's announcement with cheerful calm. "Lucy has heard already from the front."
After those endless days which the Gordons would never forget, when they waited hour after hour and day after day, for the news that never came, it seemed all at once as though good things were coming, almost before they were expected. The house was a different place in this last week, and more than once Lucy saw the old, bright smile linger on her mother's face.
"Isn't it lots nicer since Bob made the Germans let him go?" William asked his sister one day after a moment's thoughtful silence.
"Rather," was Lucy's short answer, but it seemed as though she said much more than that.
At last Bob's letter came, and with the reading of it, some at least of the darkness that had encircled him was cleared away. He could not tell all his adventures of the past two months, but through the lines the quick, sympathetic hearts of those at home guessed, as he had known they would, of the loneliness and misery that had so nearly overcome his brave spirit.
"You never could guess what one letter would have meant to me," he said, when his cautious reserve, lest they should think him almost done for, was for the moment forgotten. "If ever I have prisoners to guard—Boches, or I don't care whom—I'll give them their letters from home. It doesn't help win the war to keep them back, and it gives the prisoner a bitter feeling toward his captors that he'll never forget as long as he lives.
"But I'm all right now," he wrote cheerfully. "Cousin Henry and I are in a snug little French village near the coast, where a lot of convalescent officers and men are put up for a month or so. It's just perfect to me—the freedom and the feeling of being among friends again. Having plenty to eat is pretty comfortable, too. Once or twice I've caught Cousin Henry looking curiously at me, as though he thought I was never going to stop. I've tried to thank him for getting me out, and I've written the Spanish Ambassador at Berlin (by way of Spain), but there's no use trying to tell them all I feel. You have to be in prison to know how it feels to get out. I only hope that Sergeant Cameron has got at least one of the packages I've sent him through Switzerland. Just let's pray our army gets over here quickly by the million, and the beastly war comes to an end before 1918 is over.
"They say I can have leave to go home, but if I keep on getting well here at this rate, honestly, I don't see how I can ask it. That's for the doctor to decide anyway, so I won't bother. But when you're on this side and see all that's waiting to be done! I don't wonder Father feels the way he does about coming over, but if there is nobody behind us at home to send on the men and the supplies, where will we be?