"My brother was expelled from Harrow when he was eighteen. Until he was seventeen he was one of the sweetest natured boys you could imagine. He was full of fun and mischief but all his tutors loved him and there wasn't a particle of vice in him. Suddenly he seemed possessed of devils. He drank, he gambled—and cheated—he was insolent to his teachers. It broke my mother's heart. It helped to make my father the silent broken man he is today. It was the same when he went up to Trinity and the same when he was at Sandhurst...." There was a long pause. Trent could see she was struggling against tears. There welled up in him an almost divine pity. He wanted to soothe her, comfort her and let her cry on his shoulder.
It was in this moment that Anthony Trent knew he loved her and would always love her. Those passing affections of adolescence were pale, wan emotions compared with this. And it was an hour of grief to him. He realized that his ways of life had cut him off irremediably from marriage with such a woman as this.
"What happened," she said at last, "when you came to after being blown from that dug-out?"
"I was badly hurt," he answered, wonderingly, "those high explosives play the strangest tricks with one."
"This is what happened to my brother. He was unconscious for a very long time and his head was fearfully mangled. When he came out of ether he said very distinctly. 'Oh Bingo, how rottenly clumsy of you.'"
"Who was Bingo?" Trent asked.
"At the time nobody knew. Arthur's uniform was torn off in the explosion and his regiment unknown."
"He could have told them," Trent asserted.
She shook her head.