Cissie was afraid to interfere with this.

After a time Letty grew impatient at the delay in getting any address and took her first parcel to the post office.

“Unless you know what prison he is at,” said the postmistress.

“Pity!” said Letty.  “I don’t know that.  Must it wait for that?  I thought the Germans were so systematic that it didn’t matter.”

The postmistress made tedious explanations that Letty did not seem to hear.  She stared straight in front of her at nothing.  Then in a pause in the conversation she picked up her parcel.

“It’s tiresome for him to have to wait,” she said.  “But it can’t be long before I know.”

She took the parcel back to the cottage.

“After all,” she said, “it gives us time to get the better sort of throat lozenges for him—­the sort the syndicate shop doesn’t keep.”

She put the parcel conspicuously upon the dresser in the kitchen where it was most in the way, and set herself to make a jersey for Teddy against the coming of the cold weather.

But one night the white mask fell for a moment from her face.

Cissie and she had been sitting in silence before the fire.  She had been knitting—­she knitted very badly—­and Cissie had been pretending to read, and had been watching her furtively.  Cissie eyed the slow, toilsome growth of the slack woolwork for a time, and the touch of angry effort in every stroke of the knitting needles.  Then she was stirred to remonstrance.

“Poor Letty!” she said very softly.  “Suppose after all, he is dead?”

Letty met her with a pitiless stare.

“He is a prisoner,” she said.  “Isn’t that enough?  Why do you jab at me by saying that?  A wounded prisoner.  Isn’t that enough despicable trickery for God even to play on Teddy—­our Teddy?  To the very last moment he shall not be dead.  Until the war is over.  Until six months after the war....

“I will tell you why, Cissie....”

She leant across the table and pointed her remarks with her knitting needles, speaking in a tone of reasonable remonstrance.  “You see,” she said, “if people like Teddy are to be killed, then all our ideas that life is meant for, honesty and sweetness and happiness, are wrong, and this world is just a place of devils; just a dirty cruel hell.  Getting born would be getting damned.  And so one must not give way to that idea, however much it may seem likely that he is dead....

“You see, if he is dead, then Cruelty is the Law, and some one must pay me for his death....  Some one must pay me....  I shall wait for six months after the war, dear, and then I shall go off to Germany and learn my way about there.  And I will murder some German.  Not just a common German, but a German who belongs to the guilty kind.  A sacrifice.  It ought, for instance, to be comparatively easy to kill some of the children of the Crown Prince or some of the Bavarian princes.  I shall prefer German children.  I shall sacrifice them to Teddy.  It ought not to be difficult to find people who can be made directly responsible, the people who invented the poison gas, for instance, and kill them, or to kill people who are dear to them.  Or necessary to them....  Women can do that so much more easily than men....