"Four years", Nan thought. "Four long, hard, heartbreaking years."

Winter was coming to Canada, bringing with it all the boys in khaki. Train stations were filled to the brim of homecoming soldiers, some with joyful families to meet them, some with secret smiles, anticipating the surprise they knew would welcome them. They had all changed – they were older, battle scarred, perhaps permanently, some with bitterness and resentment, full of memories of death and suffering – but they were alive.

Nan Blythe was four years older than when we last saw her but her nut-brown hair was as long and glossy, her complexion as pink and white, and her delicacy as slender and graceful as it was of yore. It was her dreamy big brown eyes that had changed – it held suffering and grief, bitterness and despair, in their depths. She, like everyone in her generation, had grown up, way before their time.

She sat on the station bench as she waited for the Glen train, oblivious to the admiring glances sent her way, as she watched yet another sunburnt soldier tenderly wrap his arms around his overjoyed sweetheart. Tears threatened to spill over from her eyes as the loving reunion unfolded before common sense and pride – where would Nan be without it – took over.

"Silly goose," she told herself reproachfully. "You have no right to expect anything more than friendship from him."

And yet, that did not stop her from rejecting every suitor that came her way. From keeping all of his letters as if they were the most precious diamonds in the world – re-reading each line when she felt lonely, alone, or afraid. From faithfully loving him with all of her heart, even when she was not sure if he still felt the same.

But he did, once. She vividly remembers their last night together in Rainbow Valley, where she, all pride forgotten, opened her heart to him as he did to her. He loved her then but refused to hold her to a promise. Although Nan could not doubt the sincerity of his feelings then, four years of war, four years in a different place, with different girls, could have changed his regard for her.

And while his letters were almost free from any sentiment, there were some that peeked out and showed her just how he felt about her – when he wrote to her about his experience of being shot in the back and seeing a vision of her, near the spring in Rainbow Valley. When he wrote on one particularly sentimental postcript, "I'll always be yours." Short sentences, straight to the point, just like the writer himself.

But she had read too many stories of Canadian soldiers bringing French and Belgian brides with them – women who had saved them from starvation, hidden them from German troops, brave women who had experienced the war with them. And, though she knew she was being selfish, she had been both afraid and a little jealous.

Because it had been five months since his last letter, where he simply wrote that he was recovering from his wounds in a London hospital. And she had not heard from him since. He could be smitten with an English nurse, for all she knew. And what would she do then? The thought was too painful to comprehend so she turned her thoughts back to the scenes in front of her, losing herself, as she was still sometimes wont to.

She noticed a tall, dark soldier at the corner of her eye, who held himself a little stiffly, standing apart from the crowd. She imagined that he was planning to surprise his family, perhaps, his sweetheart or his wife, judging from the way he kept glancing at the train schedules and at the station clock. She smiled to herself, picturing the scene of his homecoming and then, as she remembered her own brother who would never have his homecoming, quickly looked away, valiantly hiding her sudden tears and the ache in her heart.

The soldier himself felt her eyes on him, and glancing at her, drew a sudden, sharp breath. It couldn't be – was it? He looked more closely at her – a beautiful dark-haired girl whose dreamy expression was so familiar and so dear to him. He felt as if he couldn't breathe, his heart was expanding and beating a hundred miles a minute and he felt lightheaded. Her face, the face that kept him sane in the trenches, was there, right in front of him, just a few steps away. And yet he could not move. He felt glued to the ground as a thousand feelings whirled inside him.

The station bell rang, announcing the arrival of the next train and Nan looked up and immediately caught the soldier's eye. She felt a jolt in her heart as the soldier stared at her and as their eyes met, it seemed that the spell holding him immobile had broken. Unable to speak, he moved wordlessly towards her as she stood up and froze.

He caught her cold hands, his eyes, dark and blazing, looking at her intensely as if he could not believe she was standing there. Her eyes roved his face. He was older but his eyes were still as black as she remembered, flashing and twinkling at the same time. And oh! How handsome he was. Nan, who had steadfastly stopped indulging in all her fancies as the war dragged on and on, was now experiencing the old, sweetly familiar feeling of soul-thrilling giddiness as he stood before her.

Before she could grasp any word, he broke the silence as he finally spoke the words he had been wanting to say, had been practicing over and over again, in the trenches, in the hospitals, on the boat and on the trains, the two words that had been preying on his mind all these years, those he struggled to contain through all his letters:

"Marry me."

I originally meant this story to be a one-shot, but I recently thought this up. Hope you all like it!