ing. The only officer who came that night was--you'd never
guess!--Pat Singleton."

"Pat," I said, "though a young devil, is cheerful, and I never saw him
anything but self-confident I can't imagine a girl such as you described
bearing the faintest resemblance to that boy. You said that she was a
kind of die-away, pathetic, appealing angel. Now Pat----"

"I know," said Daintree. "All the same, the likeness was there. The
moment I looked at the photo with Pat in my mind I knew why I thought I
recognized it My wife said the same thing."

"But Pat Singleton hasn't any sisters," I said.

"No, he hasn't He hasn't even a first cousin anything like the age of
the girl in the photo. I knew all the Singletons well, have for years.
But Simcox insisted his girl must be some relation of Pat's, and in
the end I promised to ask the boy. In the first place, if she was a
relation, it seemed an impudent sort of thing to do, and if she wasn't,
Pat would be sure to make up some infernal story about me and a girl and
tell it all over the place. However, my wife egged me on and poor Simcox
was so frightfully keen that I promised.

"Well, I sent for Pat Singleton next morning. He was a little subdued at
first, as much subdued as I've ever seen him. He thought I was going to
rag him about the spoof he'd played off on the nurse. He did that
before he was twelve hours in the house. Remind me to tell you about
it afterwards. I don't wonder he looked piano. She'd been going for
him herself and that woman is a real terror. However, he cheered up
the moment I showed him the photo of the girl. He asked me first of all
where the devil I'd got it. Said he'd lost it somewhere before he was
wounded."

"Oh, it was his, then?" I said.

"Yes," said Daintree, grinning, "it was his. He was particularly anxious
to know how I came by it. I didn't tell him, of course. Couldn't give
Simcox away, you know. Then Pat began to cheek me. Asked if I'd fallen
in love with the girl and what my wife would say when he told her. Said
he carried the photo about with him and showed it to fellows just to
watch them falling in love with her. It seems that nine men out of ten
admired her greatly. He asked me if I didn't think she was the prettiest
girl I'd ever seen, and that I wasn't the first man by any means who
wanted her name and address. He grinned in a most offensive way and said
that he never gave away that girl's name to anyone; that I ought to know
better than