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blow up, and if we can maintain our dicey plane-and-boat schedule, we should reach Hawaii in a month or so. Where you will be with your blessed
California,
I don’t know, but I’ll find you.

Well, there you have it! I know you were supposed to write to me before I broke silence. Sorry I violated your rule, but for all I know your letter or cable will come next week and I’ll be gone. Perhaps there’s a screed for me already in the mail from Vladivostok, or Tokyo, or Manila. If so, I hope it was a love letter, not a prudent dismissal, which was what I feared and expected. Whatever it was, Pug, I never got it.

Dearest, you can love your wife and also love me. Do I shock you? Well, the fact is you already do. You know you do. You’ve even told me so. You have only to act realistically about it. To be blunt, it’s just as possible for your wife to love you, and also love another man. Maybe that shocks you even more. But this sort of thing happens all the time, my sweet, I swear it does, especially in wartime, to perfectly good and decent people. You and Mrs. Henry have somehow spent a quarter of a century shut off in a very special church-and-Navy shell. Oh, dear! I haven’t time to type this over, or I’d cut this last stupid paragraph. I know it’s hopeless to argue.

I hate to stop writing to you now that I’m doing it at last. It’s like the breaking of a dam. But I must stop. With any luck you won’t hear from me again, you’ll see me.

The weather in London is unspeakable, and so is the war news. It really looks as though we got out of Moscow none too soon; it actually may fall, as it did to Napoleon! What a prospect! But for me, to be quite honest, the only news that counts — and it’s glorious — is that suddenly there’s a chance to see you again. I had a horrible feeling in Moscow, for all your kindness and sweetness, that I was looking my last on you. Now (crossed fingers) here I come!

Love,

Pam

    He could see the young face, hear the young warm elegantly accented voice pouring out these hurried words. The wistful, hopeless little romance with Tudsbury’s daughter which had briefly flared in Moscow was best snuffed out. Pug knew that. He had tried. Moreover, until now he thought he had succeeded. The residue of the strange frail wartime relationship — a little more than a flirtation, pathetically less than an affair — had been a better understanding of what had happened to Rhoda, and a long start on forgiving her. He only wanted his wife back. He had already written her that in strong terms. There was no conceivable future with this young woman, twenty-nine or thirty, drifting in her celebrated father’s wake.
    Best snuffed out; yet his mind raced through calculations of where they might be now. Could they have made it to Singapore before December 7th? Tudsbury was a hard-driving traveller, a human bulldozer. If he could hitch rides on warships or bombers, he would keep going. Supposing by a freak the Tudsburys did show up in Honolulu? What a rich irony Pam’s unwitting defense of Rhoda wasl Pug tore up the letter.
    Eating lunch on the back porch, Warren and Janice looked at each other as Pug came out humming in his blue service uniform.
    “We’re mighty formal,” said Janice.
    “Crease the uniform less if I walk it aboard.”
    “Mighty cheerful,” remarked Warren.
    “Prospect of sea pay.” Pug dropped in a chair at the iron-and-glass table. He consumed a large plateful of the very savory stew, asking for more onions and potatoes; more food than they had seen him put away at midday since his arrival in Pearl Harbor.
    “Mighty good appetite,” observed Warren, watching his father eat. He and Janice knew nothing of Rhoda’s divorce letter; they had ascribed Pug’s boozing and his depression, which now seemed to be lifting, to his loss of the
California.
    “Admiral Spruance hustled me five miles uphill.”
    “Dad, Jan has an idea about Natalie.”
    “Yes, why don’t you just