“Darling, I must.  They are bringing the wounded over.”

“But you mustn’t get too tired.”

“I want to be tired.  So that I can sleep.”

She was finding it hard to sleep.  Often she rose and wrote in her memory book, which was becoming in a sense a diary because she confided to its pages the things she dared not say to Derry.  Some day, perhaps, she might show him what she had written.  But that would be when the war was over, and Derry had come back safe and sound.  Until then she would have to smile in her letters, and she did not always feel like smiling!

But that was what Derry called them, “Smiling letters!”

“They smile up at me every morning, Jean.”

So she wrote to him bravely, cheerfully, of her busy days, of how she missed him, of her love and longing, but not a word did she say of her world as it really was.

But there was no laughter in the things she said to the old memory book.

“I don’t like big houses—­not houses like this, with grinning porcelain Chinese gods at every turn of the hall, and gold dragons on the bed-posts.  There are six of us here besides the servants, yet we are like dwarfs in a giant palace.  Perhaps if we had the usual fires it wouldn’t seem quite so forlorn.  But the china in the cabinets is so cold—­and the ceilings are so high—­and the marble floors—.

“Perhaps if everyone were happy it would be different.  But only Emily is happy.  And I don’t see how she can be.  She is going to marry a Hun!  Of course, he isn’t really, and he’d be a darling dear if it weren’t for his German name, and his German blood, and the German things he has in his house.  But Emily says she loves his house, that it speaks to her of a different Germany—­of the sweet old gay Germany that waltzed and sang and loved simple things.  It seems so funny to think of Emily in love—­she’s so much older than people are usually when they are engaged and married.

“But Emily is the only happy one, except the children, and I sometimes think that even they have the shadow on them of the dreadful things that are happening.  Margaret-Mary tries to knit, and tires her stubby little fingers with the big needles, and Teddy, poor chap, seems to feel that he must be the man of the family and take his father’s place, and he is pathetically careful of his mother.

“I wonder if Margaret feels as I do about it all?  She is so sweet and smiling—­and yet I know how her heart weeps, and I know how she longs for her own house and her own hearth and her own husband—­

“Oh, when my Derry comes back safe and sound—­and he will come back safe, I shall say it over and over to myself until I make it true—­when Derry comes back, we’ll build a cottage, with windows that look out on trees and a garden—­and there’ll be cozy little rooms, and we’ll take Polly Ann and Muffin—­and live happy ever after—.

“I wonder how father stands it to be always with people who are sick?  I never knew what it meant until now.  The General is an old dear—­but sometimes when I sit in that queer room of his with its lacquer and gold and see him in his gorgeous dressing gown, I feel afraid.  It is rather dreadful to think that he was once young and strong like Derry, and that he will never be young and strong again.