The Return of the Soldier
"He isn't well! He isn't well!" she said pleadingly. "He's lost his memory, and thinks—thinks he still knows me."

She passed the telegram to Kitty, who read it, and laid it on her knee.

"See," said Mrs. Grey, "it's addressed to Margaret Allington, my maiden name, and I've been married these ten years. And it was sent to my old home, Monkey Island, at Bray. Father kept the inn there. It's fifteen years since we left it. I never should have got this telegram if me and my husband hadn't been down there last September and told the folks who keep it now who I was."

Kitty folded up the telegram and said in a little voice:

"This is a likely story."

Again Mrs. Grey's eyes brimmed. "People are rude to one," she visibly said, but surely not nice people like this. She simply continued to sit.

Kitty cried out, as though arguing:

"There's nothing about shell-shock in this wire."

Our visitor melted into a trembling shyness.

"There was a letter, too."

Kitty held out her hand.

She gasped:

"Oh, no, I couldn't do that!"

"I must have it," said Kitty.

The caller's eyes grew great. She rose and dived clumsily for her umbrella, which had again slipped under the chair.

"I can't," she cried, and scurried to the open door like a pelted dog. She would have run down the steps at once had not some tender thought arrested her. She turned to me trustfully and stammered, "He is at that hospital I said," as if, since I had dealt her no direct blow, I might be able to salve the news she brought from the general wreck of manners. And then Kitty's stiff pallor struck to her heart, and cried comfortingly across the distance, "I 
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