ye here."

"Rubbish! I want you to meet Mr. Laramore."

Tam looked at the keen-faced young athlete and slowly extended his hand.

"I think you know my sister," said the smiling youth, "and certainly we
all know you."

He gave the pilot a grip which would have crushed a hand of ordinary
muscularity.

"A've run up against the young lady in ma travels," said Tam solemnly.

Laramore laughed. "I saw her for a moment to-day and she asked me to
remind you of your appointment."

"An appointment--with a lady? Oh, Tam!" said the shocked Brandspeth,
producing from his overcoat pocket a siphon of soda, a large flask of
amber-brown liquid and a bundle of cigars, and setting them upon the
table. "Really, Tam is always making the strangest acquaintances."

"He never met anybody stranger than Vera--or better," said Laramore,
with a little laugh. "Vera, I suppose, is worth a million dollars. She
is a citizen of a neutral country. She can have the bulliest time any
girl could desire, and yet she elects to come to France, drive a car
over abominable roads which are more often than not under shell-fire,
and sleep in a leaky old shack for forty cents a day."

Brandspeth was filling the glasses.

"You're a neutral, too--say when--I suppose you're not exactly a pauper
and yet you risk breaking your neck for ten francs per. Help yourself to
a cigar, Tam--I said a cigar."

"Try one o' mine, sir-r," said Tam coolly, and produced a box of
Perfectos from under his bed; "ye may take one apiece and it's fair to
tell ye A've coonted them."

They spent a moderate but joyous evening, but Tam, standing in the
doorway of his "bunk," watched the figures of his guests receding into
the darkness with a sense of depression. He had no social ambitions, he
had no desire to be anything other than the man he was. If he looked
forward to his return to civil life at the war's end, he did so with
equanimity, though that return meant a life in soiled overalls amid the
hum and clang of a factory shop.

He had none of that divine discontent which is half the equipment of
Scottish youth. Rather did he possess ambition's surest antidote in a
mild and kindly cynicism which stripped endeavor of its illusions.

It was on the Wednesday night after he had written a polite little note
to the One Hundred and Thirty-first General Hospital accepting the
invitation to lunch and had received one of Blackie's tentative permits
to take a day's leave (Tam called them