heed to, that had lain like dry bones in her memory, suddenly were clothed in flesh and became alive.  This God—­if this was God—­then indeed it was not nonsense to say that God was love, that he was a friend and companion....  With him it might be possible to face a world in which Teddy and she would never walk side by side again nor plan any more happiness for ever.  After all she had been very happy; she had had wonderful happiness.  She had had far more happiness, far more love, in her short years or so than most people had in their whole lives.  And so in the reaction of her emotions, Letty, who had gone out with her head full of murder and revenge, came back through the sunset thinking of pity, of the thousand kindnesses and tendernesses of Teddy that were, after all, perhaps only an intimation of the limitless kindnesses and tendernesses of God....  What right had she to a white and bitter grief, self-centred and vindictive, while old Britling could still plan an age of mercy in the earth and a red-gold sunlight that was warm as a smile from Teddy lay on all the world....

She must go into the cottage and kiss Cissie, and put away that parcel out of sight until she could find some poor soldier to whom she could send it.  She had been pitiless towards Cissie in her grief.  She had, in the egotism of her sorrow, treated Cissie as she might have treated a chair or a table, with no thought that Cissie might be weary, might dream of happiness still to come.  Cissie had still to play the lover, and her man was already in khaki.  There would be no such year as Letty had had in the days before the war darkened the world.  Before Cissie’s marrying the peace must come, and the peace was still far away.  And Direck too would have to take his chances....

Letty came through the little wood and over the stile that brought her into sight of the cottage.  The windows of the cottage as she saw it under the bough of the big walnut tree, were afire from the sun.  The crimson rambler over the porch that she and Teddy had planted was still bearing roses.  The door was open and people were moving in the porch.

Some one was coming out of the cottage, a stranger, in an unfamiliar costume, and behind him was a man in khaki—­but that was Mr. Direck!  And behind him again was Cissie.

But the stranger!

He came out of the frame of the porch towards the garden gate....

Who—­who was this stranger?

It was a man in queer-looking foreign clothes, baggy trousers of some soft-looking blue stuff and a blouse, and he had a white-bandaged left arm.  He had a hat stuck at the back of his head, and a beard....

He was entirely a stranger, a foreigner.  Was she going insane?  Of course he was a stranger!

And then he moved a step, he made a queer sideways pace, a caper, on the path, and instantly he ceased to be strange and foreign.  He became amazingly, incredibly, familiar by virtue of that step....