He put out his hands towards me and drew me close to him.
‘My poor dear Helen,’ he said. ‘Oh, my poor dear!’
XXXIII
The next day, came a letter from Cousin Delia, a short, quiet note, that was like her.
‘You will have seen yesterday that Hugo is missing. We have no further news of him,’ she wrote. ‘His father has been to the War Office, but they can tell him nothing more. Hugo was missing on the ninth after the taking of Cambrai. They could not collect all the wounded on that day, and when they did so, he was not among them. There was very heavy shelling on both days, and it is probable that he was killed. I am making inquiries at the hospitals for men of his battalion who were in that fighting, and I will let you know if I have any news.’
I read and reread her letter, and I wondered, as I had often wondered, at the calm of Cousin Delia, and I thought that she would die if she lost Hugo. Quietly, calmly, as she had lived, she would die.
And I thought all day of Yearsly, of the old brick walls, and the apple blossom, and Guy and Hugo, calling from the trees; and I thought of Cousin Delia in the garden as she had been when we were little, with her long yellow gloves, and her shady garden hat.
And I thought:
‘That is all over. The world has gone on since then.’
And my own grief became part of the world’s grief, and my own loss, part of the world’s loss.