"On getting a bit of ribbon."
I opened my eyes, for this was the first I had heard of it.
"It isn't out yet," said he, "but I believe it's to be your doom. Somebody has presumably bribed some one at the Admiralty. Uncle Francis tipped me the wink. You've evidently quite made your peace there, Roger, so congratulations again."
This hint of a decoration was gratifying enough, and to hear, on top of it, his assurance that my dear old uncle had really opened his heart again nearly upset me disgracefully. I was evidently still a little weaker than I realised. However, Jack was tact itself and the talk turned to every-day matters.
He had been sitting beside me for some little time discussing the war, the world, and the devil, before it began to strike me as quite remarkably kind, even for so good a fellow as Jack Whiteclett, to come so far out of his way to look me up. His own wife was at Portsmouth last I heard of her, all his other interests were in London, and yet here he was looking up a cousin in a hospital a couple of hundred miles away from either place.
"By the way, how long have you got?" I asked.
"A week."
I sat up in my deck chair.
"Only a week! I say this is extraordinarily good of you to come down here and see me."
"Oh, I wanted to see how heroes bear their wounds," he smiled, but I felt certain there was something more left unsaid.