"The reason she was arrested was because they found in her room at the boarding-house a lot of notes about the engineering-works, our works, which she had been going to send off to that soldier-brother of hers, Karl. She declared she didn't know she wasn't supposed to, and that she hadn't an idea of our going to War with her country or anything, and I'm sure she didn't mean any harm at all. She said she'd seen her brother Karl in England the week before War was declared, and that he hadn't said a word to her then. And so perhaps he was that waiter all the time. You know, the one we saw, in the cab that last Sunday of peace-time. I expect he is fighting us now, isn't it extraordinary?"
This was the end of the sheet. Gwenna took another. Her letters to the Front were always at least six times as long as the answers that she received to them, but this was only to be expected. And Paul had said he loved long letters and that she was to tell him absolutely everything she could. All about herself.
She went on:
"You tell me to take care of myself and not to work too hard; well, I am not. And I am quite well and Mrs. Crewe is most awfully kind to me, and the little maid here spoils me. Every night when I am in bed she insists on bringing me up a glass of hot milk and two biscuits, though what for I don't know.
"Is there anything more about your coming back from the Front to fetch the P.D.Q.? Oh, it would be so lovely to see you even for a few days. I sometimes feel as if I had never, never seen you——"
She sighed deeply in the quiet, lamp-lit room, where the chintz-casement curtains stirred faintly above the open window. It had been so long, so long, all this time of being without him. Why, she had scarcely had a week of knowing him hers, before there had come that rushed War-bridal and the Good-bye! And all she had to live on were her memories and a glazed picture postcard, and a packet of pencil-scrawled letters of which the folds were worn into slits. She couldn't even write to him as she would have wished. Always there brooded over her that spectre "The Censor," who possibly read every letter that was addressed to a man at the Front. Gwenna knew that some people at home wrote anything they wished, heedless that a stranger's eye might see it. Leslie, for instance, wrote to one of her medical students, now working with the R.A.M.C. in Paris, as "My dear Harry—and the Censor," adding an occasional parenthesis: "You won't understand this expression, Mr. Censor, as it is merely a quite silly family joke!" She, Gwenna, felt utterly unable to write down more than a tithe of the tender things that she would have liked to say. To-night she had a longing to pour out her heart to him ... oh, and she would say something! Even if she tore up that sheet and wrote another. She scribbled down hastily: "Darling boy, do you know I miss you more every day; nobody has ever missed anybody so dreadfully."
Here she was wrong, though she did not know it. It was true that she longed hungrily for the sight of that dear blonde face, with its blue, intrepid eyes, for the sound of that deep and gentle voice, and for the touch of those hands, those strongly modelled lips. But all these things had been a new joy, scarcely realised before it was gone. She would have told you that it made it worse for her. Actually it meant that she was spared much. Her lover's presence had been a gift given and snatched away; not the comradeship of years that, missing, would seem even as the loss of a limb to her. The ties of daily habit and custom which strengthen that many-stranded cord of Love had not yet been woven between these two lovers.
"I sometimes think it was really awfully selfish of me to marry you," Gwenna wrote, thinking to herself, "Oh, bother that old Censor, just for once." She went on more hurriedly:
"You might have married somebody like that Miss Muriel Conyers, with those frightfully lovely clothes and all her people able to help you on in the Army, or somebody very beautiful and rich, anybody would have been glad to have you, and I know I am just a little nobody, and not a bit clever and even Leslie used to say I had a Welshy accent sometimes when I speak, and I daresay lots of people will think, oh, 'how could he!—why, she isn't even very pretty!'"
She raised her eyes, deeper and brighter in the lamplight, and gave a questioning glance at her reflection in the oval, swung mirror on the dressing-table at which she wrote. It would have been a captious critic indeed that could have called her anything less than very pretty at that moment; with her little face flushed and intent, a mixture of child and woman in the expression of her eyes and about her soft, parted lips. Above the ruffle of her night-gown her throat rose proudly; thick and creamy and smooth. She remembered something he'd told her that afternoon at Kew. He'd said that she always reminded him of any kind of white flower that was sturdy and sweet; a posy of white clover, a white, night-blooming stock, some kinds of white roses.... She would like to send him a flower, in this letter, to remind him.