June 15. Peter, can it be Peter, with that expression upon his face? He is really here, and a transfiguring look of suffering has worn away forever a something of earth and of stubbornness,--a Peter who seems to have gained greatly in strength and in stature, although one arm is gone, and an empty sleeve hangs by his side. If I had known how to salute I should have saluted Peter when I saw him home from the war; mentally I do it whenever I see him working with his one poor hand in my garden beds. One of the first things he said to me when he came home was that he was going to Shepperton to try to get work that a one-armed man could do, selling papers or something of the kind. But Peter, who has faced the enemy and the poisonous gases, flinched before my countenance when I heard this. Peter knows now that the little red house and the garden can never get on without him. It is odd to see the animals with him; Don cannot be attentive enough, but you would expect a dog to understand. Puck is a wonder, standing as meekly as a lamb to let himself be harnessed by a one-armed man, though he used to dance an ancient British war-dance as the straps went on. The old racial love of fair fighting shines out in him; man to man it used to be, or man to pony, when both were able-bodied, but he will take no advantage of a handicap. He seldom shies now, even at a feather or a floating leaf, but he watches constantly in every direction, waiting for some great danger in which he can comport himself with perfect self-control for the sake of a one-armed man; defying the whole modern era to invent a mechanism that can frighten him. I should like an equestrian statue of Puck _not_ shying at a Zeppelin! Madge is pathetic; she has lost her old moorings of prejudice and conviction and sails in an uncharted sea of life. Church and State are to her only a shade less reprehensible than the Germans, since Peter came home without an arm. While Peter, completely changed, and loyal to the government, for the country he has served so well is his country indeed, sits with her on the bench by the kitchen door in the twilight, full of affectionate talk of "Kitchener" and "Bobs"--his grief over Lord Roberts' death was both sincere and personal--Madge mutters fiercely against the 'Ouse of Lords for its selfishness and its incompetence. If women ruled, all would be different! Her condemnation of the government would suggest that she is in a fair way to become both an anarchist and a suffragette. She never would have let Peter go a step to war if she had supposed that he would be wounded. Peter came home, not with a Victoria Cross, but with an Iron Cross, and I can never tell whether he is joking or in earnest when he explains his possession of it. When I asked him how he got it, he replied: "I bestowed it upon meself, Miss." It seems that he had taken it from a German with whom he had fought in a terrible bayonet charge.