"I knew; he'd been wounded, but I
didn't hear he'd been sent to your place."

"Pat Singleton's always everywhere," said Daintree. "I've never come
across a place where he wasn't, and he's a devil for mischief. Remind me
afterwards to tell you about the trick he played on the principal nurse,
a Scotchwoman with a perfectly terrific sense of her own dignity,"
Daintree chuckled.

"If you'd rather tell me that story," I said, "instead of the one about
Simcox, I'd just as soon have it. In fact, I'd prefer it. Sob stories
are always trying."

"But I'm not sure that the Simcox one is a sob story, though there's a
certain amount of slosh in it. Anyhow, I've got to tell it to you, for
my wife says you're the only man she knows who can advise what ought to
be done."

"All right," I said, "but Pat Singleton's escapades always amuse me. I'd
like to hear about his making an apple-pie bed for that nurse."

Daintree chuckled again, and I gathered from the expression of his face
that the nurse had endured something worse than an apple-pie bed.

"Or about the boat-races," I said. "I didn't know you had anything which
floated on that lake of yours."

"I haven't," said Daintree, "except the kind of wooden box in which the
gardener goes out to clear away the duck-weed. However, Pat Singleton
comes into the Simcox story in the end. It's really about him that my
wife wants your advice."

"No one," I said, "can give advice about Pat Singleton."

"Knowing the sort of man Simcox is," said Daintree, "you'll understand
that he was rather out of it at first in a-house full of boys just out
of hospital and jolly glad to have a chance of running about a bit. Pat
Singleton wasn't there when Simcox arrived. But the others were nearly
as bad; silly jokes from morning to night and an infernal row always
going on. My wife likes that sort of thing, fortunately."

"Simcox, I suppose, just sat by himself in a corner of the veranda and
glowered?"

"Exactly. And at first my wife could do nothing with him. In the end, of
course----"

"In the end," I said, "she persuaded him to tell her his inmost secrets
and to confide to her the tragedy of his soul. That's just what she
would do."

Mrs. Daintree is a very kind and sympathetic lady. When she talks to me
I feel ready to tell her anything. A man like Simcox, shy, reserved, and
wholly unaccustomed to charming ladies, would succumb to her easily and
pour out a love story or anything else he happe