es that to the influence of this--this----"

"Angel visitant?" I said.

"You can call her an angel if you like," said Daintree.

"This," I said, "seems to me a pure sob story. If there's any other part
less harrowing, I wish you'd hurry up and get to it."

"All right," said Daintree. "I'll cut out the rest of his experiences
in that shell hole, though, mind you, they're rather interesting and
frightfully poetic the way my wife tells them. After two days our
fellows got back into the wood and kept it. The stretcher-bearers found
Simcox in his hole and they lugged him down to a Casualty Clearing
Station. From that he went to a hospital--the usual round, He had a
pretty bad time, first over there, and then, when they could move him,
in London. By degrees he got more sane about the photo. He stopped
thinking she was any kind of spirit and took to regarding her just as
a girl, though a very exceptional kind of girl, of course. He was
hopelessly in love with her. Do you think a man really could fall in
love with a photo?"

"Simcox did," I said, "so we needn't discuss that point."

"The chances were, of course," said Daintree, "that she was some other
fellow's girl, possibly some other fellow's wife. But Simcox didn't
care. He was too far gone to care for anything except to get that girl.
Those morose, shy men are frightfully hard hit in that sort of way, I'm
told. That's what my wife says, anyhow. They get it much worse than we
do when they do get it. Simcox would have dragged that girl out of
the arms of an archbishop if that was where he found her. Of course he
couldn't go hunting her over England while he was in hospital with a bad
leg; but he made up his mind to find out who she was and where she
lived as soon as he was well enough to go about He'd very little to go
on--practically nothing. The photo had been cut down so as to fit into
the cigarette case, so that there wasn't even a photographer's name on
it."

"He might have advertised," I said. "There are papers which go in for
that sort of thing, publish rows of reproductions of photographs 'Found
on the battle-field,'with requests for identification."

"My wife thought of that," said Daintree, "but Simcox didn't seem
to take to the idea. He said the photo was too sacred a thing to be
reproduced in a paper. My own idea is that he was afraid of any kind
of publicity. You see, the other fellow might turn up--the fellow who
really had a right to the girl."

"Ho