As I sat there with a corduroy jacket about my shoulders, my muddy boots heavy on my tired feet, and held the letter with the Italian postmark unopened for a moment in my hands it seemed as if the past four years were a dream, and the scene before me an utter unreality. At the gate to the road stood a pair of orange trees upon which the fruit was being left to ripen for home consumption. The orchards were stripped weeks earlier, for we picked green and sweated our oranges. Beyond the sentinel trees with their yellow fruit glowing like lanterns in the dark foliage, a flock of runner ducks squawked noisily in the head ditch, which had flowed by the house since the early days when Peaches' mother lived there and used to get the water for her household from it. Distantly a file of turbaned Hindu pickers, bound for a neighbor's walnut grove, passed, silhouetted against the sky, and vanished into the more overbearing outlines of a row of eucalyptus trees upon the ridge, and a pair of smartly overalled, immaculate Japanese laborers equipped like aviators, and gloved against the orange thorns, passed along the road, chattering unintelligibly, their picking equipment strapped to their shoulders like knapsacks, their sturdy boots swinging rhythmically to their chatter. I could see all this, and the environment, which had once been as strange as a prism seen through a kaleidoscope, yet which was the only reality I had known for four years, now took on its pristine strangeness once more, and the letter in my hands brought a wave of homesickness upon me--not for Italy, but for Boston, I scarcely know why. For several moments I sat so, and then at length I opened the envelope where the censor had closed it, and read. It sounded tired, that letter did, though, of course, it told very little, being censored. "We are frightfully busy," Abby wrote, "but hopeful of an end to it all before long. I hope it may be true that peace is near, for we have suffered enough. We are not so gay as once we were, my dear, but just as brave. Things have changed so, and people are gone. I hear among others that our gay, mysterious and gallant Sandro was killed at ---- Sir Anthony told me, and he got it from Captain Silvano, whom you may remember at Mentone. Killed in a very brave bit of action, I believe, too. Ah, well! So many people are making reparation for sins known and unknown by heroic sacrifice in the war. It is the great confessional." I did not read further just then. Something impelled me to look up. Alicia was standing in front of me with grave golden eyes, her body actually seeming to give off a magnetic force which compelled me against my will to an immediate confession of what I would have preferred to break to her in a proper fashion. "Free!" she said too quietly. "Is he--dead?"