The more often Doggie read this perfectly phrased epistle, the greater waxed his puzzledom. The gratitude was all there; more than enough. It was gratitude and nothing else. He had longed for a human story telling just how the thing had happened, just how Jeanne had felt. He had wanted her to say: "Get well soon and come back, and I'll tell you all about it." But instead of that she dwelt on the difference of their social status, loftily announced that they would never meet again and that they would follow different destinies, and bade him the _adieu_ which in French is the final leave-taking. All of which to Doggie, the unsophisticated, would have seemed ridiculous, had it not been so tragic. He couldn't reconcile the beautiful letter, written in faultless handwriting and impeccable French, with the rain-swept girl on the escarpment. What did she mean? What had come over her? But the ways of Jeannes are not the ways of Doggies. How was he to know of the boastings of Phineas McPhail, and the hopelessness with which they filled Jeanne's heart? How was he to know that she had sat up most of the night in her little room over the gateway, drafting and redrafting this precious composition, until, having reduced it to soul-devastating correctitude, and, with aching eyes and head, made a fair and faultless copy, she had once more cried herself into miserable slumber? At once Doggie called for pad and pencil, and began to write: "MY DEAR JEANNE,-- "I don't understand. What fly has stung you? (_Quelle mouche vous a piquee?_) Of course we shall meet again. Do you suppose I am going to let you go out of my life?" (He sucked his pencil. Jeanne must be spoken to severely.) "What rubbish are you talking about my social position? My father was an English parson (_pasteur anglais_) and yours a French lawyer. If I have a little money of my own, so have you. And we are not ships and we have not passed in the night. And that we should not meet again is not Life. It is absurdity. We are going to meet as soon as wounds and war will let me, and I am not your '_Cher Monsieur_,' but your '_Cher Dog-gie_,' and----" "Here is a letter for you, brought by hand," said the nurse, bustling to his bedside. It was from Peggy. "Oh, lord!" said Doggie. Peggy was there. She had arrived from Durdlebury all alone, the night before, and was putting up at an hotel. The venerable idiot, with red crosses and bits of tin all over her, who seemed to run the hospital, wouldn't let her in to see him till the regulation visiting hour of three o'clock. That she, Peggy, was a Dean's daughter, who had travelled hundreds of miles to see the man she was engaged to, did not seem to impress the venerable idiot in the least. Till three o'clock then. With love from Peggy. "The lady, I believe, is waiting for an answer," said the nurse. "Oh, my hat!" said Doggie below his breath.