haps if she said anything of the kind her letter might
not get through.

There was nothing Mrs. Otway desired to say which
the sternest Censor could have found fault with in
either country, but the poor soul did not know that.
Still, even so, she wrote a very charming letter of
gratitude -- so charming, indeed, and so admirably expressed,
that when the Medical Superintendent at last
received it, he said to himself, "The gracious lady
writer of this letter must be partly German. No Englishwoman
could have written like this!"

There was one more letter to write, but Mrs. Otway
found no difficulty in expressing in few sentences her
warm gratitude to her new friend at Arlington Street.

She put the three letters in a large envelope -- the
one for the German hospital carefully addressed according
to the direction at the top of the Medical
Superintendent's letter, but open as she had been told
to leave it. On chance, for she was quite ignorant
whether the postage should be prepaid, she put a
twopenny-halfpenny stamp on the letter, and then,
having done that, fastened down the big envelope and
addressed it to Mrs. Gaunt, at 20, Arlington Street.

Then she took another envelope out of her drawer --
that containing Major Guthrie's bank-notes. There,
in with them, was still the postcard he had written
to her from France, immediately after the landing of
the Expeditionary Force. She looked at the clearly-written
French sentence -- the sentence in which the
writer maybe had tried to convey something of his
yearning for her. Taking the india-rubber band off
the notes, she put one into her purse. She was very
sorry now that she hadn't done as he had asked her --

[[276]]

p275 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p276w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p277

v?