But the eminence of his knee proved such an embarrassing vantage ground that he soon let her go.
"Good-night," she said, slipping her hand into his. "Good-night, Granddaddy, dear," and she kissed him again, a real kiss this time, as if he were her father, or Buddy.
"Well, well," he said, "well, well!" and sat holding her by the shoulders so long that he almost seemed to have forgotten she was there. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her up the stairs again, tucking her into bed with a hand as accustomed as Grandma's.
"Fourteen years old and letting her grandfather put her to bed the way he did when she was a baby. Ain't you ashamed?" he asked, playfully, in a tone she had never heard him use before.
"No, I'm proud," Elizabeth said, and she meant it.
Under her pillow was her brother's letter, and she lit a flickering bedside lamp to read it by before she went finally to sleep. It was a short letter, slanting down the paper, as he was not yet able to sit up in his bed long enough to write properly. He said:
Dear Sister-on-her-birthday:
I'd be willing to eat a German helmet to be able to spend this day with you. But the U. S. base hospital—base is the word—has got me for the present. I send you my respects, and fourteen and one half kisses to grow on.
For the love of Michael, don't get priggish in your old age. Some of your letters have made me wonder if there was nobody home where my sister lived, but lately they've seemed more the real thing. Get acquainted with your grandfather and grandmother. Grandfather once told me that he had come to the conclusion there was only one person in the world he had to keep an eye on, and that was himself. Good talk, Sis.
Which endeth the lesson.
Buddy.
As she tucked the letter back in its envelope, she realized that the sheet which had been wrapped around it to prevent its scrawly surface from showing through the transparent envelope was not blank as she had at first supposed; she spread it out before her, thinking to find a postscript to her own letter, but it was not that. It was evidently a sheet of a letter begun and discarded. Elizabeth had read it before she realized that it was not meant for her eyes to see. "Sweetheart—Sweetheart—Sweetheart—" it ran, "I have never called you this, and I have no right to call you so now, or any other name. At least, not for many years to come. I'm done for. I love you, and I can't try for you. That's something the war has done for a lot—more——" Here it broke off, abruptly.
"Oh, Buddy, Buddy," Elizabeth cried, "I didn't mean to snoop. How perfectly, perfectly terrible!"
It was two in the morning before she slept. She lay wide eyed in the darkness, thinking of her brother and Peggy Farraday's sister. It couldn't be anybody else—she knew that much about Buddy. For the first time in her life she was feeling the weight of a trouble that did not make her want to cry.