November 1918, Hobson, Lancashire

She stood in front of the cheval glass, the long mirror that Peter had given her on their second anniversary, and considered herself. Her hair had faded from shimmering English fair to almost the color of straw, and her face was lined from working in the vegetable beds throughout the war, though she'd worn a hat and gloves. Her skin, once like silk-he'd always told her that-was showing faint lines, and her eyes, though still very blue, stared back at her from some other woman's old face.

Four years-have I really aged that much in four years? she asked her image.

With a sigh she accepted the fact that she wouldn't see forty-four again. But he'd have aged too. Probably more than she had-war was no seaside picnic on a summer's afternoon.

That thought failed to cheer her. She wanted to see joy and surprise in his face when he came home at last. The war was finally over-the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Yesterday. It wouldn't be long now before he came striding over the hill and up the lane.

Surely they would send the men in France home quickly. It had been four long lonely unbearable years. Even the Army couldn't expect families to wait beyond a month-six weeks. It wasn't as if the Allies must occupy Germany. This was, after all, an armistice, not a surrender. The Germans would be as eager to go home as the British.

Peter was some years younger than she, for heaven's sake-though she'd never confessed to that, lying cheerfully about her age from the start. A man in his midthirties had no business going to fight in France. But of course he was a career soldier, fighting was what he did, in all the distant corners of the Empire. France was nearly next door; it would require only a Channel crossing and he'd be in Dover.