ese that John's mother and I filled in
the time between his letters. They came as if by a schedule. We knew
what post should bring one. And once or twice a letter was a post
late and our hearts were in our throats with fear. And then came a
day when there should have been a letter, and none came. The whole
day passed. I tried to comfort John's mother! I tried to believe
myself that it was no more than a mischance of the post. But it was
not that.

We could do nought but wait. Ah, but the folks at home in Britain
know all too well those sinister breaks in the chains of letters from
the front! Such a break may mean nothing or anything.

For us, news came quickly. But it was not a letter from John that
came to us. It was a telegram from the war office and it told us no
more than that our boy was wounded and in hospital.

CHAPTER VI

"Wounded and in hospital!"

That might have meant anything. And for a whole week that was all we
knew. To hope for word more definite until--and unless--John himself
could send us a message, appeared to be hopeless. Every effort we
made ended in failure. And, indeed, at such a time, private inquiries
could not well be made. The messages that had to do with the war and
with the business of the armies had to be dealt with first.

But at last, after a week in which his mother and I almost went mad
with anxiety, there came a note from our laddie himself. He told us
not to fret--that all that ailed him was that his nose was split and
his wrist bashed up a bit! His mother looked at me and I at her. It
seemed bad enough to us! But he made light of his wounds--aye, and he
was right! When I thought of men I'd seen in hospitals--men with
wounds so frightful that they may not be told of--I rejoiced that
John had fared so well.

And I hoped, too, that his wounds would bring him home to us--to
Blighty, as the Tommies were beginning to call Britain. But his
wounds were not serious enough for that and so soon as they were
healed, he went back to the trenches.

"Don't worry about me," he wrote to us. "Lots of fellows out here
have been wounded five and six times, and don't think anything of it.
I'll be all right so long as I don't get knocked out."

He didn't tell us then that it was the bursting of a shell that gave
him his first wounded stripe. But he wrote to us regularly again, and
there were scarcely any days in which a letter did not come either to
me or to his mother. When one of those b