ng man whose trembling knees--"

"Sorry," said Sammy, turning to the locker and fishing forth a
bottle.

"--I'll tell you why," Yarrell-Smith went on as the tot was filled.
"First place, the Bosch has finished hating us for to-night and gone
to bye-bye. Secondly, it's starting to sleet--and that vicious, a
man can't see five yards in front of him."

"I love my love with a B because he's Boschy," said Sammy lightly:
"I'll take him to Berlin--or say, Bapaume to begin with--and feed him
on Substitutes. . . . Do you know that parlour-game, Yarrell dear?
Are you a performer at Musical Chairs? Were you by any chance
brought up on a book called _What Shall We do Now?_ The fact is--"
Sammy, who could be irreverent, but so as never to offend, stole a
look at Otway--"we're a trifle hipped in the old log cabin.
I started a guessing-competition just now, and our Commanding
Officer won't play. Turn up the reference, Polky--Ecclesiastes
something-or-other. It runs: 'We are become as a skittle-alley in a
garden of cucumbers, forasmuch as our centurion will not come out to
play with us.'"

Otway laughed. "And it goes on that the grasshopper is a
burden. . . . But Y.-S. has given you the name, just now."

"_I_, sir?" Yarrell-Smith gazed, in the more astonishment to find
that Otway, after his laugh, reaching up to trim the lamp, looked
strangely serious. "I'm blest if I understand a word of all
this. . . . What name, sir?"

"_Hate_," said Otway, dropping back into his chair and drawing
at his pipe. "But you're warm; as they say in the nursery-game.
Try '_Foe_,' if you prefer it."

"Oh, I see," protested Yarrell-Smith, after a bewildered look around.
"You've all agreed to be funny with a poor orphan that has just come
in from the cold."

Barham paid no heed to this. "'Foe' might be the name of a man.
It's unusual. . . . But what was the Johnny called who wrote
_Robinson Crusoe?_"

"It _was_ the name of a man," answered Otway.

"_This_ man?" Barham tapped his finger on the newspaper.

Otway nodded.

"The man the inquest was held on?"

"That--or the other." Otway looked around at them queerly. "I think
the other. But upon my soul I won't swear."

"The other? You mean the stranger--the man who interrupted--"

At this point Yarrell-Smith sank upon a locker. "I beg your pardon,
all of you," he moaned helplessly; "but if there's such a thing about
as First Aid--"

"Sammy had better read you this thing he's