Remembering this now, I offered my cousin a sympathetic cigarette, which he, shaking himself free from care, accepted; after which he began to borrow ten pounds—an achievement which, I am proud to say, cost him nearly twenty minutes' hard labour.
Not so very long afterwards Adela and I had a honeymoon, followed by a picture-postcard from Herbert. He said he was sorry he hadn't been there to throw boots at us, but he was convalescing on the Cornish Riviera, the exact spot being marked with a cross; also one could not send money by postcard, but I was not to think he was forgetting about that fiver he had borrowed.
The first part of this document caused Adela to wonder vaguely if wounded officers ought to convalesce in chimney-pots, but the last words gave me some twinges of a more sincere alarm. Was Herbert's delusion a permanency, or merely a slip of the pen?
"Adela," I decided, "let's ask Herbert to dinner as soon as ever he leaves the roofs of the British Riviera."
Then one day, when I was writing letters in the Mess, he strolled in. "Hullo!" he said, "where's the C.O.? What?... Oh, thanks awfully, and ... Oh, I say, good Lord! I owe you three quid, don't I?" and he drifted out abstractedly.
"Three!" I echoed dizzily, as the door banged. I staggered home for the week-end.
I found Adela having an excited conversation with the telephone in the hall.
"Ooo!" she said, hanging up the receiver, "Herbert's a hero. He's just been telling me. And he's coming to dinner to-night."
"I also," I responded with emotion, "have a tale to unfold," and I unfolded it.
When at last Herbert, moving modestly under the burden of a newly acquired D.S.O., arrived at the flat, hospitality and an unaccustomed awe withheld me from referring to so sordid a matter as the inconsiderable decrease in my lately-invested capital. Herbert, however, deprecated heroics, and, as he was saying good-night, came of his own accord to the subject of debts. He was always a conscientious fellow.