CHAPTER XI

THE LAND-GIRLS' LETTER-BAG

"A word in due season, how good it is!"--SCRIPTURE.

At the Camp we found the Timber-gang buzzing about what constituted for all of us the great event of the day--the day's mail.

It arrived after the girls were already at work, so that since breakfast they had been looking forward to the letters, wondering about them....

Ah, these letters! Most people realize by this time how much they have always meant to the boys at the Front. They meant as much and more to the war-working girls! You people who "can't be bothered to write much," you correspondents who "forget"--I wish you could have seen that group of uniformed lasses with the green Forestry ribbons round their hats, clustering about the forewoman who held the packet. I wish you could have heard the eager tone of their "Any for me?"

"Two for you, Curley--one from France. Oh! girls, look at the snapshots of me sister's nippers. 'To Auntie Vic, with love from Stan'--all right, ain't it?" cried Vic.

"Only these four for me?" exclaimed the red-haired Welsh timber girl.

"And none for me! Isn't it a cruel shame?" lamented Lil. "Here, Aggie, do let me have a read of yours----"

"I say, this isn't for me. It got slipped in among mine. 'Miss Weare'--who's she when she's at home? Oh! The little new one. Here, Mop----"

Elizabeth took the letter.

I was reading a kind letter from Agatha, my step-mother, who ended with, "Still I hope you will not find that this new venture of yours is a mistake after all," when there was a little sudden laugh and a quick exclamation from my chum at my elbow.

"Joan, I say, Joan!"

"Yes? Who've you heard from?"

"Who d'you think?" she returned amusedly, taking me by the elbow to draw me aside into the porch. "I'll give you three guesses!"

"Man or woman? Ah, I needn't ask. Woman, of course?"

"As it happens, no!"

"What? A man?" I exclaimed. "But you never write to any men----"

"Don't I? I do."

"Only to one landlord," I said. "Only to the ancient Colonel!"

Elizabeth gave her gurgling boyish chuckle.

"Right in one," she said. "It is the old Colonel again. You know I wrote to him last about that loose scullery tap that we had to leave as it was. Well, he's home on sick leave now, he says, and he writes from our flat--his own flat, I mean. Only he's coming down here very shortly----"

"Here?" I exclaimed, glancing round the big hut, with its characteristic grouping of Land Girls off duty.

Some of them were still poring and chattering over their mail; Peggy, with her foot upon a chair, was cleaning her hobnailed boots; Vic, now clad in a bathing costume and her Land Army hat, was sitting on a corner of the table, swinging her legs, whistling, and stitching at a button that had come loose on her khaki breeches.

"This is no place for a dear old gentleman like your colonel! What does he want to come here for?" I added.

"Says he'll be staying with a friend of his in this neighbourhood," explained Elizabeth, handing me the note with the neat, precise handwriting that we had seen on so many business letters, "and that as I was here he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon me if he might. Antediluvian touch, isn't it? And, of course, he won't be allowed to call here, I suppose, even at his age."

"Oh, but I hope we shall meet him," I said, as I prepared to get into bathing-things again for my swimming lesson from Vic and Sybil in the pool. "It will be rather fun, after all our guess-work, to see what the funny old thing really is like."

Now this was vouchsafed to us in a few days from then. And I admit that this, and what it brought in its train, has been quite one of the shocks of my life.