E. Nesbit

“ Can't you see any light?”
But she could not.
Then he must hear her life-story—of scholarships and college, and a dying woman commending her cousin Bessie to her care—of chaperonage—of anxieties,
“And then you came,” she said, “and I knew she did not care—and—but I've told you all that. Listen! Can you hear anything—anything different?”
They held their breath and listened. And it was the sound of picks and shovels they heard.
“We aren't going to die,” he said. “My brave lady of the letters, we're going to have life to learn to know each other in.” ”

“ If we're going to die here together you shall know. She never cared. She couldn't even be bothered to write to you. I wrote all those letters. All the letters you wrote were written to me, to me, to me. Oh, won't you forgive me, in case we're going to die?”
“We won't die,” he said, and his voice was changed. "Those letters? It was you who wrote them? But the letters——”
“They do count for something, don't they?” she urged. “They were half of it, weren't they? Didn't the letters count for as much as—as what Bessie gave you? Don't the letters count at all, then?” ”

“ And you can get us unmarried if you like. Or—you can forgive me, and let me try to teach you to love me.
“Love you?” he cried, flinging her hands away. “You, who make a mock of a blind man and trick him into marrying you? And then talk of love—why, I don't even know that my Bessie has given me up. ”

“ She was being whirled through a maze of mean streets that mocked the sunshine, opposite a man with pale set face, and eyes that did not see you—did not any more see anything. He was, as now for ever he knew he must be, in black darkness: the darkness at present was shaken and jarred, and in the darkness there was a voice that answered when he spoke. ”

“ For he stayed in Folkestone, and every day he and the bright flushed Bessie and the pale cousin met and had tea and walked on the Leas, or to Cæar's Camp, or along the road past the pebbly waste.
If it had not been for the constant chaperonage of the cousin, his fancy might have spent itself in pretty speeches, chocolates, flowers, and perhaps a kiss or two. And so, back to the trenches a free man still. ”

“ Don't be unhappy—we'll get it all put right. Only not Bessie, because she's gone off with somebody else.”
It was then that he sat down and covered his face with his hands. And she watched the sunlit fields speed by, then the sunlight was shut off by a deep cutting, and the train ran screaming into a tunnel.
IT was almost at once that the shock came, a shock of unbelievable violence that threw each of them against the side of the carriage. The lamps were extinguished and a red light flamed at the window's; there was a rattle and roar. Cries and shouts, then raging spluttering of an engine. ”

“ And I was afraid, too—you won't think that silly; men are afraid of saying the wrong thing just as much as girls are—more, I think. But we're not afraid of each other now, are we? And if our time together was short then, it's to be tong, long, long when the war's over—a whole, long, happy life together, my dear wild-rose-face—my darling sweetheart.”
IT was quite a thick packet of letters that they found with a photograph in his pocket when he was wounded. ”

“ It was the real self, but with all the lights heightened, the shadows deepened—the real man or woman painted with flaming colours and a coarse brush, or perhaps rather the real man or woman conventionalized to a sort of typical blowsy loud definiteness—like cheap oleographs of great pictures. ”

“ Let's hold on to each other. After all, neither of us is alone.” And he held her more closely, for indeed the clasp of her hand round his neck had a magic of its own that reinforced the magic of her soft voice—so like Bessie's, so very like, and yet with a note in it that he had longed for in Bessie's voice and had never heard. Bessie, and her kisses—the fleet, brief hours. The letters—the long, slow weeks and months. ”

“ And then the hospital was shelled, and when things were quiet again his arm was mending, but he was blind. The doctors could find no injury and no disease. Only, he could not see. And the doctors gave no hope. They were each doing three men's work and were rather short in their answers, but quite plain.
So he got a nurse to write for him to Bessie—to tell her that now he was blind he felt that marriage was not for him, and that he hoped she would soon forget him—all the things, you know, that you could get a nurse to write for you. ”

“ And if they aren't, why, you'll want someone to read and write letters for you till they are all right. And that someone is going to be ME. So get your kind nurse to write and tell me that you would like me to put up the banns."
With more to the same tune.
But at the bottom of the page she wrote very large and plain, “To the Nurse. Private. Make him see that I can't give him up. I love him more than life. It's for my own sake, not his, that I want to marry hint. Make him see that.”
The nurse, as it happened, was a person capable of seeing such things and of causing them to be seen. ”

“ That the young man's means were such as to ensure that their married life would begin in nothing less than a nice villa—possibly even detached—with a “girl,” or perhaps even two, and no silly worry about money—really, to do Bessie justice, counted for very little. ”