Yes, to think of Little Yeogh Wough beginning to care for any girl!
As I went on rummaging in the wardrobe, I came across a little loose pile of letters which he had sent back from the Front. I should never dream in the ordinary way of reading anybody else's letters—I carefully avoid looking into his private drawer in this same piece of furniture—but it happens that he told me playfully that I could read any of the letters in this particular little pile, if I chose.
The first two were from myself to him. Of course I might look at those.
They bore signs of violent usage in the opening. I have a habit of fastening down the flaps of my envelopes with stickphast, and then making them still more secure by sitting on the letters in a book. So Little Yeogh Wough had often told me that, whenever he saw a letter of mine arriving, he sent his soldier servant for an entrenching tool to open it with.
Not that he had any right to tease me on this matter. For he followed the same plan himself in fastening letters. He always used stickphast and he always sat on the missives in a book.
Whenever we bought a book that we did not enjoy, we took it to sit on as a correspondence flattener.
"Don't you ever believe anybody who says they've opened by mistake any letter that you'd written," Little Yeogh Wough said to me once. "It's a sheer impossibility."
The letter from myself to him, which I had just taken up, was one which he had marked to be put away later on in his despatch box for permanent safe keeping. I recognise it as one that I had written at a time when I knew he was in particular danger. Vera had made him promise that when there was going to be a great "push," or when any other circumstances arose which materially increased the ordinary risk to his life, he would send her a certain short Latin sentence. In an hour of crisis he had sent this sentence, and the anxious girl, who thought of him all day and dreamed of him all night, had passed on the warning to me.
A chill ran through my blood as I re-read my own written words: