Page:Our Girls.pdf/101

 the days passed—three, four, five, six—and nothing came to her. It was paralysing, this blank silence. To know that her husband was dead, and that they had buried him—that would have been so human, so comforting. But this dead stopping, this silence, it was like being plunged to the bottom of the sea, with all sound and hearing gone.

Then on the seventh day came great news from the War Office. There had been a mistake. Gunner So-and-so had suffered no casualty. It had been the other soldier of the same name who had been killed in action!

When they brought the telegram to the young woman in the workshop, and she had read it, she first flung her arms about her chum at the next lathe, and then went down on her knees in "the street" to thank God for being so good to her. All the girls gathered round and cried with her, and then they laughed, and then they laughed and cried at the same time and were very merry.