Somehow that phrase stuck in her mind. When she rose before daylight in the bitter mornings of midwinter to light the kitchen fire and prepare a meal she would have to eat alone, she would remember those words which he of all men had used, he who was a born growser if ever there was one. "It's no use growsing here." She tried to take in their meaning, but the task was not easy. He wrote so cheerfully that he could hardly mean what he said. And it was his nearest approach to complaint, he whose life in peace time had been one long complaint. Now and again she read in the _Tribune_ of things that made her shiver. Sometimes in the winter darkness she awoke with these things in her mind. Bill's letters, however, gave no details. If he spoke of "a scrap," he did so casually, without embroidery, yet she remembered that once when he had cut his thumb, not very badly, he fainted at the sight of blood. Such letters were a puzzle; they told so little. She couldn't make them out. Reading between the lines, he seemed to be enjoying life more than he had ever done, he seemed to realize the humor of it more. It was very strange that it should be so, especially on the part of one who had always taken things so hard. In one letter he said that spring was coming and that the look of the sky made him think of the crocuses along Sharrow Lane, and then added as a brief postscript, "Stanning's gone." Some weeks later he wrote from the Base to say that "he had had a whiff of gas, nothing to speak of," but that he was out of the Line for a bit. And then after a cheerful letter or two in the meantime, he wrote a month later to say that he had got leave for ten days and that he was coming home. It was the middle of June when he turned up in Love Lane late one evening, without notice, laden like a beast of burden, looking very brown and well but terribly worn and shabby. So much had he changed in appearance that Melia felt it would have been easy to pass him in the street without recognizing him. He was thin and gray, even his features, and particularly his eyes, seemed to have altered. The tone of his voice was different; he spoke in a different way; the words and phrases he used were not those of the William Hollis she had always known. He was glad to be back in his home, if only for a few days, and the sight of him with his heavy pack and his gas mask and his helmet laid on the new linoleum in the little sitting room behind the shop gave her a deeper pleasure than anything life had offered her so far. Strange as he was, new almost to the point of being somebody else, the mere sight of him thrilled her. She was thrilled to the verge of happiness. It was something beyond any previous emotion. Long ago she had given up believing that ever again he would appeal to her in the way of that brief time which had been once and had passed so soon.