"Daddy," she shrieked in excitement, "Mr. Trent has medals too."
"So you were in the big thing?" Edgell asked. "Honestly wouldn't you rather play golf? I can get all the excitement I want on the Stock Exchange to last me the rest of my life. I enlisted in a city regiment as a private and I left it as adjutant after four years and I'm all for the piping ways of peace. My battalion was the 78th and we always had the luck with us. Whenever we got anywhere something started."
"The seventy-eighth battalion," Trent commented, "I had a pal in your battalion, a pal who saved my life. I'm going to look him up next week. Curious that I should be talking to his adjutant. William Smith was his name. I wonder if you knew him?"
"I wonder if you know how many William Smiths and John Smiths are lying in France and Flanders with little wooden crosses over them?"
"This one came through all right," Trent said.
"At least ten William Smiths came through," Edgell asserted. "I think I remember them all. Which was your man? Describe him."
Trent lighted his cigarette very deliberately. To be asked to describe a man he had claimed as a pal and yet had never seen face to face was not easy.
"I think you would recognize my William Smith," Trent answered, "if I told you he was not really William Smith at all but a man who had assumed that name as a disguise."
"I understand," Edgell exclaimed, "a slight blond man very erect and rather supercilious with what the other men called a lah-de-dah voice. I remember him well. I had him up before me for punishment many times. Little infractions of discipline which he constantly committed. Used to rile me by his superior airs. Quite a mysterious person. Saved your life did he? Well, he had all the pluck a man need have."
"I want to thank him for it," Trent said, "but I've only known him as William Smith. The War Office people tell me he was demobilized three months back and they have no address. If you'll tell me, in confidence, his real name I can find him out."