mugs) and had cut her
bread-and-butter too thick. I must cut dainty slices of thin
bread-and-butter, use Sister's own china ware, and serve the whole
spread on a tray with a cloth. All of which was typical of Sister, who
from that day treated Bill's wife with true tenderness; and Bill's wife
became one of Sister's most enthusiastic adorers.

It came to pass, after a week of pitiful anxiety, that the Medical
Officer pronounced Bill safe once more. "Bloke says I'm not goin' ter
peg art," he told me. I congratulated him and remarked that his wife
would be thankful when he met her, on her arrival, with such splendid
news. "I'll 'ave the larf of my missus," said Bill. "W'en she comes, I
shall tell 'er I've some serious noos for 'er, and she's ter send the
kid darn on the grarse ter play. Then I'll pull a long fice and hask 'er
ter bear up, and say I'm sorry for 'er, and she mustn't tike it too
rough, and all that; and she 'as my sympathy in 'er diserpointment: _she
ain't ter get 'er widow's pension arter all_!"

I believe that this programme was carried through, more or less to the
letter. Certain it is that I myself overheard another of Bill's grim
pleasantries. He was explaining to madame that they must apprentice
their offspring to the engineering trade. "I wanter mike Lil' Bill a
mowter chap, so's 'e can oil the ball-bearings of me fancy leg wot I'm
ter get at Roehampton." The "fancy leg" ended by being the favourite
theme of Bill's disgraceful extravaganzas. He would announce to Sister,
when she was dressing his stump, that he had been studying means of
earning his living in the future, and had decided to become a professor
of roller skating. He would loudly tell his wife that she would never
again be able to summons him for assault by kicking: the fancy leg would
not give the real one sufficient purchase for an effective kick. And she
was not to complain, in future, about his cold feet against her back in
bed: there would be only one cold foot, the other would be unhitched and
on the floor. And of course there were endless jokes about what had been
done with the amputated leg, whether it had got a tombstone, and so
forth: some of the suggestions going a trifle beyond what good taste, in
more fastidious coteries, would have thought permissible. But Bill had
his own ideas of the humorous, and maybe his own no less definite ideas
of dignity. In this latter virtue I counted the fact that although once
or twice, when he wa