t it at eight. Two hours of scornful silence."

This fierce, strained, unjust Letty was a new aspect to Mr. Britling.
Her treatment of his proffered consolations made him feel slightly
henpecked.

"And just fancy!" she said. "They have no means of knowing if he has
arrived safely on the German side. How can they know he is a prisoner
without knowing that?"

"But the word is 'missing.'"

"That _means_ a prisoner," said Letty uncivilly....

Section 13

Mr. Britling returned to the Dower House perplexed and profoundly
disturbed. He had a distressful sense that things were far more serious
with Teddy than he had tried to persuade Letty they were; that "wounded
and missing" meant indeed a man abandoned to very sinister
probabilities. He was distressed for Teddy, and still more acutely
distressed for Mrs. Teddy, whose every note and gesture betrayed
suppositions even more sinister than his own. And that preposterous
sense of liability, because he had helped Teddy to get his commission,
was more distressful than it had ever been. He was surprised that Letty
had not assailed him with railing accusations.

And this event had wiped off at one sweep all the protective scab of
habituation that had gathered over the wound of Hugh's departure. He was
back face to face with the one evil chance in five....

In the hall there was lying a letter from Hugh that had come by the
second post. It was a relief even to see it....

Hugh had had his first spell in the trenches.

Before his departure he had promised his half brothers a long and
circumstantial account of what the trenches were really like. Here he
redeemed his promise. He had evidently written with the idea that the
letter would be handed over to them.

"Tell the bruddykinses I'm glad they're going to Brinsmead school. Later
on, I suppose, they will go on to Statesminster. I suppose that you
don't care to send them so far in these troubled times....

"And now about those trenches--as I promised. The great thing to grasp
is that they are narrow. They are a sort of negative wall. They are more
like giant cracks in the ground than anything else.... But perhaps I had
better begin by telling how we got there. We started about one in the
morning ladened up with everything you can possibly imagine on a
soldier, and in addition I had a kettle--filled with water--most of the
chaps had bundles of firewood, and some had extra bread. We marched out
of our quarters along the ro