“And I am WILD to see your war cross. Some of the officers here have them--the crosses, I mean--but not many. Captain Blanchard has the military medal, and he is almost as modest about it as you are about your decoration. I don't see how you CAN be so modest. If _I_ had a Croix de Guerre I should want EVERY ONE to know about it. At the tea dance the other afternoon there was a British major who--”
And so on. The second letter was really a continuation of the first. Albert read them both and, after the reading was finished, sat for some time in the rocking chair, quite regardless of the time and the cold, thinking. He took from his pocketbook a photograph, one which Madeline had sent him months before, which had reached him while he lay in the French hospital after his removal from the German camp. He looked at the pretty face in the photograph. She looked just as he remembered her, almost exactly as she had looked more than two years before, smiling, charming, carefree. She had not, apparently, grown older, those age-long months had not changed her. He rose and regarded his own reflection in the mirror of the bureau. He was surprised, as he was constantly being surprised, to see that he, too, had not changed greatly in personal appearance.
He walked about the room. His grandmother had told him that his room was just as he had left it. “I wouldn't change it, Albert,” she said, “even when we thought you--you wasn't comin' back. I couldn't touch it, somehow. I kept thinkin', 'Some day I will. Pretty soon I MUST.' But I never did, and now I'm so glad.”
He wandered back to the bureau and pulled open the upper drawers. In those drawers were so many things, things which he had kept there, either deliberately or because he was too indolent to destroy them. Old dance cards, invitations, and a bundle of photographs, snapshots. He removed the rubber band from the bundle and stood looking them over. Photographs of school fellows, of picnic groups, of girls. Sam Thatcher, Gertie Kendrick--and Helen Kendall. There were at least a dozen of Helen.
One in particular was very good. From that photograph the face of Helen as he had known it four years before looked straight up into his--clear-eyed, honest, a hint of humor and understanding and common-sense in the gaze and at the corners of the lips. He looked at the photograph, and the photograph looked up at him. He had not seen her for so long a time. He wondered if the war had changed her as it had changed him. Somehow he hoped it had not. Change did not seem necessary in her case.