Every time a letter came from Eddie, or if a mail were missed, she expected the blow to fall, all her laboriously made plans to be destroyed, her pride and dignity trampled underfoot, all her life wrecked. She was utterly in the dark. She had no idea what was going on, or what had already happened, and she could take no steps to gain information. She could do nothing but wait. Then came another letter from Vincent: I am home on leave. That means that we shall very soon be going over. Good-by, Angelica! I have a hard, bitterly hard task before me. I must hurt Eddie and I must hurt you. As for me, there is nothing before me but death. Deserted and ruined as I am, I long for death. Your love was all that pleased me in life. With that gone, there is nothing but a waste, bleak beyond endurance. I shall only beg Eddie to forgive my vile treachery, as I beg you to forgive my sins against you. Forget your presumptuous and wicked dream of marrying that good man. That can never be. He will forgive you, as he will forgive me, but he will never forget. Good-by, Angelica. I give you to God! VINCENT. Asleep and awake that picture haunted her--a vision of Eddie, mud-stained, horribly pale, sitting on a box, with a candle flickering on the ground beside him, in a dugout with mud walls and great puddles of filthy water--the sort of thing she had seen in the cinema, ghastly, desolate, with an incessant play of rockets and bursting shells overhead; and Vincent standing before him in one of his fine attitudes, so handsome, so strong, so noble, telling him. She knew how he would dwell upon the details, with what colour he would describe her caresses, her kisses, heightening the temptation just as he would heighten his remorse. It didn’t occur to her that Vincent might encounter some obstacles to a prompt meeting with his brother, with all the different services and all the vast battlefield to be considered. She fancied him being at once directed to Eddie’s dugout like a stranger in a village. She lived in a long nightmare. She didn’t know how the blow would fall--whether she would come home to find a letter from Eddie, casting her off; whether Mrs. Russell would be there to tell her; whether she would have a letter from some stranger, a friend of Eddie’s--a lawyer, perhaps. But what she most feared was the idea of coming to Fine Feathers some morning and seeing Sillon and Devery suddenly turned hostile. She felt that she could not bear that. It would do for her.