“Oh, my dear!” she choked. “There, that will make you think it was all right. You shall never know--never--what really happened. Oh, Georgie, Georgie, come very quick and take me away! How can I go on living with these beasts? Oh, Georgie, be quick, be quick!” Then this silly Mary with handkerchief, with india-rubber, and with pen-knife erased a stain of grief that had fallen upon her pretty story; sniffed back her tears; lifted again her pen. Now she wrote in an eager scrawl; nib flying. Had her George not been so very ordinary a young man he must have perceived the difference between that first portion so neatly penned--parti-coloured words showing where the ink had dried while the poor little brain puzzled and planned at every syllable--and this where emotion sped the thoughts. III. “So that's all right” (she wrote), “and now we've only got to wait, a few, few weeks. Dearest, will they fly or will they drag? What does love do to time, I wonder--whip or brake?--speed or pull? Georgie mine, I feel I don't care. If the days fly I shall be riding in them--galloping to you, wind in the face; shouting them on; standing up all flushed with the swing and the rush of it; waving to the people we go thundering past and gazing along the road where soon I will see you--nearer and nearer and nearer. “And if the days creep? Well, at first, after that picture, the thought seems melancholy, unbearable. But that is wrong. The realisation will not be unbearable. If they creep, why, then I shall lie in them, very comfortable, very happy; dreaming of you, seeing you, speaking with you, touching you. Yes, touching you. For, my dear, you are here in the room with me as I write. I look up just to my right, and there you are, Georgie mine; sitting on the end of my bed, smiling at me. You have not left me, my dear, since we parted on the seat this morning. Why, I cannot even write that it is only in imagination that I see you. For me it is not imagination. I do, do see you, Georgie mine. You are part of me, never to leave me. “How new, how different, love makes life! Everything I do, everything I see, everything I hear has a new interest because it is something to share with you, something to save up and tell you. I am in trouble (you understand that I am not, shall never be again; this is only illustration--you must read it 'if I were in trouble'). I am in trouble, and you are sharing it with me, sympathising so that trouble is an unkind word for what is indeed but an opportunity acutely to feel the joy of loving and being loved. I am happy, and the happiness is a thousandfold increased because it comes to me warmed through you. I am amused, and it is something to tell you and to laugh at the more heartily by the compelling sound of your own laughter.