Sanbourne, not to John Denin.

"My God--she's read the book. _She's written!_"

He had to say the words over to himself before he could make the thing
seem credible.

And even then he did not open the letter. He dreaded to open it, and
sat very still and rigid, grasping the envelope as if it were an
electric battery of which he could not let go.

What if she hated the book? What if she wrote, as a woman who had been
twice a war bride, to say that a subject such as he had chosen was too
sacred to put into print? What if she felt bound to reproach the author
for treading brutally on holy ground?

If that was what the letter had to say to him, his message of peace had
failed, and all his patched-up scheme of existence broke down in that
one failure.

The thought that he was a coward shrinking from a blow nerved him to
open the letter. He was on the point of tearing the envelope, but he
could not be rough with a thing Barbara had touched, nor could he
deface it. He took up the scissors and cut off one end of the envelope,
then drew out a sheet of the familiar gray-blue paper. Unfolding it,
his hands trembled. All the rest of his life, such as it was, he felt,
hung on what he was about to read.

The letter began abruptly. "You must have many letters from strangers,
but none will bring you more gratitude than this. If you are like your
book, you are too generous to be bored by grateful words from people
whose sore hearts you helped to heal, so I won't apologize. You could
not write as you do, I think, if you didn't want to do good to others.
Will you then help me, even more than you have helped me already, by
answering a question I am going to ask? Will you tell me whether the
wonderful things you say, to comfort those of us who are losing our
dearest in battle, are just inspired _thoughts_, or whether you have
yourself been very near death, so near that you caught a vision from
the other side? If you answer me, and if you say that actual experience
gave you this knowledge, your book--which has already been like a
strong hand dragging me up from the depths--will become a beautiful
message meant especially for me out of all the whole world, making all
my future life bearable.

"Every night for months I've gone to bed unable to sleep, because I've
felt exactly as if my brain were a battlefield, full of the agony and
hopelessness of brave men dying violent and dreadful deaths, cut off in
the midst of youth, with the