“He can’t be so mad as that,” I said. “Just fancy going out into a field—I suppose that’s the way you’d do it—and hanging about until your great love set you strolling off either to the right or to the left. No man, however mad, could expect to come on a girl that way—no one particular girl, I mean. Of course you’d meet several girls whichever way you went. Couldn’t help it. The world’s full of girls.”
“I don’t know what he meant,” said Daintree, “but my wife sympathized with him and seemed to think he’d pull it off in the end. At first he was a bit shy of letting her see the photo; but when he saw she was as sympathetic as all that he showed it to her. Well, the moment she saw it, she felt that she knew the face.”
“That was a stroke of luck for Simcox.”
“No it wasn’t,” said Daintree, “for my wife couldn’t put a name to the girl. She was sure she had seen her somewhere, knew her quite well, in fact, but simply couldn’t fix her. Funny thing, but it was exactly the same when they showed me the photo. At the first glance I said right away that I knew her. Then I found I couldn’t say exactly who she was. The more I looked the more certain I was that I’d seen her somewhere, her or someone very like her. And it wasn’t a commonplace face by any means. Poor Simcox kept begging us to think. My wife went over our visitors’ book—we’ve kept one of those silly things for years—but there wasn’t a name in it which we couldn’t account for. I got out all the old albums of snapshots and amateur photos in the house. You know the way those things accumulate; groups of all sorts. But we couldn’t find the girl. And yet both my wife and I were sure we’d met her. Then one morning Simcox burst into my wife’s little sitting-room—a place none of the convalescents have any right to go. He was in a fierce state of excitement. Said that an officer who’d arrived the night before was exactly like the photo and that the girl must be his sister or cousin, or something. 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.