I wrote to Cousin Delia, and to Hugo, and to Guy. I meant to write to George too, but there was an interruption, I forget now what it was, and I put it off, and put it off again, and did not write at all in the end.
Cousin Delia answered me first.
‘Yes, they are both gone,’ she said, ‘they had to go; there was, of course, no choice. Guy will find something he has wanted, I believe. I am more afraid for Hugo,’ and then she gave me their addresses (though I had got them already from Grandmother) and said she would like to see me soon; nothing about the War, or what she felt about it all; that was like Cousin Delia too.
‘We have offered the house as a hospital, if they want it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if they will . . .’
Guy’s letter, too, was like himself.
‘Dear Helen,’ he wrote,—
‘Many thanks for yours. Yes, here we are really in for it at last, or so it seems. I am having no end of a time at present. My men are simply topping; makes one proud of one’s country, and all that sort of thing, to see what its “men in the street” are like. Funny too, to be doing the thing in earnest now, after playing at it so often. We ought to get out fairly soon, as our battalion was nominally on a war footing before, but you never know. The beastly show may be over before we actually get there; I should be sorry to miss it all now I’ve got so far.’
‘Poor old Hugo doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself much, but I shouldn’t be surprised if he got out before us all the same. The best chance is to be drafted out into the regular battalions, I believe. You know George is down at Aldershot. I haven’t heard from him since he got there . . .’
Hugo did not write for ten days; then it was a long letter.
‘Dear Helen,—