also presently be set aside, so that Teddy would
become just exactly what Teddy had always been.

Teddy had been shot through the upper arm....

"My hand has gone, dear little Letty. It's my left hand, luckily. I
shall have to wear a hook like some old pirate...."

There was something about his being taken prisoner. "That other
officer"--that was Mr. Direck's officer--"had been lying there for
days." Teddy had been shot through the upper arm, and stunned by a
falling beam. When he came to he was disarmed, with a German standing
over him....

Then afterwards he had escaped. In quite a little time he had escaped.
He had been in a railway station somewhere in Belgium; locked in a
waiting-room with three or four French prisoners, and the junction had
been bombed by French and British aeroplanes. Their guard and two of the
prisoners had been killed. In the confusion the others had got away into
the town. There were trucks of hay on fire, and a store of petrol was
in danger. "After that one was bound to escape. One would have been shot
if one had been found wandering about."

The bomb had driven some splinters of glass and corrugated iron into
Teddy's wrist; it seemed a small place at first; it didn't trouble him
for weeks. But then some dirt got into it.

In the narrow cobbled street beyond the station he had happened upon a
woman who knew no English, but who took him to a priest, and the priest
had hidden him.

Letty did not piece together the whole story at first. She did not want
the story very much; she wanted to know about this hand and arm.

There would be queer things in the story when it came to be told. There
was an old peasant who had made Teddy work in his fields in spite of his
smashed and aching arm, and who had pointed to a passing German when
Teddy demurred; there were the people called "they" who had at that time
organised the escape of stragglers into Holland. There was the night
watch, those long nights in succession before the dash for liberty. But
Letty's concern was all with the hand. Inside the sling there was
something that hurt the imagination, something bandaged, a stump. She
could not think of it. She could not get away from the thought of it.

"But why did you lose your hand?"

It was only a little place at first, and then it got painful....

"But I didn't go into a hospital because I was afraid they would intern
me, and so I wouldn't be able to come home. And I was dying to come
home.