was a man in queer-looking foreign clothes, baggy trousers of some
soft-looking blue stuff and a blouse, and he had a white-bandaged left
arm. He had a hat stuck at the back of his head, and a beard....

He was entirely a stranger, a foreigner. Was she going insane? Of course
he was a stranger!

And then he moved a step, he made a queer sideways pace, a caper, on the
path, and instantly he ceased to be strange and foreign. He became
amazingly, incredibly, familiar by virtue of that step....

_No!_

Her breath stopped. All Letty's being seemed to stop. And this stranger
who was also incredibly familiar, after he had stared at her motionless
form for a moment, waved his hat with a gesture--a gesture that crowned
and scaled the effect of familiarity. She gave no sign in reply.

No, that familiarity was just a mad freakishness in things.

This strange man came from Belgium perhaps, to tell something about
Teddy....

And then she surprised herself by making a groaning noise, an absurd
silly noise, just like the noise when one imitates a cow to a child. She
said "Mooo-oo."

And she began to run forward, with legs that seemed misfits, waving her
hands about, and as she ran she saw more and more certainly that this
wounded man in strange clothing was Teddy. She ran faster and still
faster, stumbling and nearly falling. If she did not get to him speedily
the world would burst.

To hold him, to hold close to him!...

"Letty! Letty! Just one arm...."

She was clinging to him and he was holding her....

It was all right. She had always known it was all right. (Hold close to
him.) Except just for a little while. But that had been foolishness.
Hadn't she always known he was alive? And here he was alive! (Hold close
to him.) Only it was so good to be sure--after all her torment; to hold
him, to hang about him, to feel the solid man, kissing her, weeping too,
weeping together with her. "Teddy my love!"

Section 12

Letty was in the cottage struggling to hear and understand things too
complicated for her emotion-crowded mind. There was something that Mr.
Direck was trying to explain about a delayed telegram that had come soon
after she had gone out. There was much indeed that Mr. Direck was trying
to explain. What did any explanation really matter when you had Teddy,
with nothing but a strange beard and a bandaged arm between him and
yourself? She had an absurd persuasion at first that those two
strangenesses would