No!

Her breath stopped.  All Letty’s being seemed to stop.  And this stranger who was also incredibly familiar, after he had stared at her motionless form for a moment, waved his hat with a gesture—­a gesture that crowned and scaled the effect of familiarity.  She gave no sign in reply.

No, that familiarity was just a mad freakishness in things.

This strange man came from Belgium perhaps, to tell something about Teddy....

And then she surprised herself by making a groaning noise, an absurd silly noise, just like the noise when one imitates a cow to a child.  She said “Mooo-oo.”

And she began to run forward, with legs that seemed misfits, waving her hands about, and as she ran she saw more and more certainly that this wounded man in strange clothing was Teddy.  She ran faster and still faster, stumbling and nearly falling.  If she did not get to him speedily the world would burst.

To hold him, to hold close to him!...

“Letty!  Letty!  Just one arm....”

She was clinging to him and he was holding her....

It was all right.  She had always known it was all right. (Hold close to him.) Except just for a little while.  But that had been foolishness.  Hadn’t she always known he was alive?  And here he was alive! (Hold close to him.) Only it was so good to be sure—­after all her torment; to hold him, to hang about him, to feel the solid man, kissing her, weeping too, weeping together with her.  “Teddy my love!”

Section 12

Letty was in the cottage struggling to hear and understand things too complicated for her emotion-crowded mind.  There was something that Mr. Direck was trying to explain about a delayed telegram that had come soon after she had gone out.  There was much indeed that Mr. Direck was trying to explain.  What did any explanation really matter when you had Teddy, with nothing but a strange beard and a bandaged arm between him and yourself?  She had an absurd persuasion at first that those two strangenesses would also presently be set aside, so that Teddy would become just exactly what Teddy had always been.

Teddy had been shot through the upper arm....

“My hand has gone, dear little Letty.  It’s my left hand, luckily.  I shall have to wear a hook like some old pirate....”

There was something about his being taken prisoner.  “That other officer”—­that was Mr. Direck’s officer—­“had been lying there for days.”  Teddy had been shot through the upper arm, and stunned by a falling beam.  When he came to he was disarmed, with a German standing over him....

Then afterwards he had escaped.  In quite a little time he had escaped.  He had been in a railway station somewhere in Belgium; locked in a waiting-room with three or four French prisoners, and the junction had been bombed by French and British aeroplanes.  Their guard and two of the prisoners had been killed.  In the confusion the others had got away into the town.  There were trucks of hay on fire, and a store of petrol was in danger.  “After that one was bound to escape.  One would have been shot if one had been found wandering about.”