And we are not ships and we have not passed in the night. And
that we should not meet again is not Life. It is absurdity. We
are going to meet as soon as wounds and war will let me, and I
am not your '_Cher Monsieur_,' but your '_Cher Dog-gie_,'
and----"

"Here is a letter for you, brought by hand," said the nurse, bustling
to his bedside.

It was from Peggy.

"Oh, lord!" said Doggie.

Peggy was there. She had arrived from Durdlebury all alone, the night
before, and was putting up at an hotel. The venerable idiot, with red
crosses and bits of tin all over her, who seemed to run the hospital,
wouldn't let her in to see him till the regulation visiting hour of
three o'clock. That she, Peggy, was a Dean's daughter, who had
travelled hundreds of miles to see the man she was engaged to, did not
seem to impress the venerable idiot in the least. Till three o'clock
then. With love from Peggy.

"The lady, I believe, is waiting for an answer," said the nurse.

"Oh, my hat!" said Doggie below his breath.

To write the answer, he had to strip from the pad the page on which he
had begun the letter to Jeanne. He wrote: "Dearest Peggy." Then the
pencil-point's impress through the thin paper stared at him. Almost
every word was decipherable. Recklessly he tore the pad in half and on
a virgin page scribbled his message to Peggy. The nurse departed with
it. He took up the flimsy sheet containing his interrupted letter to
Jeanne and glanced at it in dismay. For the first time it struck him
that such words, to a girl even of the lowest intelligence, could only
have one interpretation. Doggie said, "Oh, lord!" and "Oh, my hat!"
and Oh all sorts of unprintable things that he had learned in the
army. And he put to himself the essential question: What the Hades was
he playing at?

Obviously, the first thing to do was to destroy the letter to Jeanne
and the tell-tale impress. This he forthwith did. He tore the sheets
into the tiniest fragments, stretched out his arm to put the handful
on the table by the bed, missed his aim and dropped it on the floor.
Whereby he incurred the just wrath of the hard-worked nurse.

Again he took up Jeanne's letter. After all, what was wrong with it?
He must look at things from her point of view. What had really
happened? Let him set out the facts judicially. They had struck up a
day or two's friendship. She had told him, as she might have told any
decent soul, her sad and romantic