It had been all of nine years since I first met Horne at an _estancia_ house-party in the heart of the Argentine Pampas, and fully seven since I last saw him at a banquet given at the Buenos Aires Jockey Club in his honour, a day or two after he had led his four to victory in the finals of the River Plate polo championships. Yet, in spite of the pallor of a face I had always remembered as bronzed, and a slight hitch in his once swinging gait, I recognised him instantly--it was the keen, piercing glance, I think, and the sudden flash of white teeth in the quick smile--when he hailed me from a passing taxi and came hobbling back along the broad pavement of Whitehall to meet me. “What does this mean?” I asked, indicating his jaunty Flying Corps uniform, after we had shaken hands. “I thought it was the army you were in before you resigned to become an opulent _estanciero_ and ‘man-about-the-Pampas.’” “It was the army I came back to,” he replied, “and I was with my old regiment at Neuve Chapelle when a fragment of hand-grenade effected a semi-solution of the continuity of one of my Achilles tendons and put a period on my further usefulness in that branch of the service. The ‘air’ was still open to me, however, and, as I had already dabbled in flying,--I was the first man to pilot an aeroplane across the Plate estuary,--I got a commission almost immediately, and so lost very little time.” “But your ‘lily-white’ face and hands,” I pressed. “I never heard that the air had a bleaching effect on the complexion.” “Oh--that--” (Horne looked absently at a blue-veined hand and shuffled uneasily), “that must have come from my spell of ‘C.H.’--confined in hospital. Got knocked up a bit again. Flying over Belgium. Got shot down and hit the edge of Holland a trifle too hard when I volplaned over the boundary. Telescoped a few vertebræ, that’s all. Now, be a good chap and stop asking questions and jump in with me and come along to the Club.” Horne waited for me while I picked up a few promised figures at the “Lloyd-Georgery,” as he facetiously called the new Ministry of Munitions in Whitehall Gardens, and then took me up to one of the Service clubs in Piccadilly. There, without giving me further chance to “get him up into the air,” he launched at once into news and reminiscence of the Plate and the Pampas. When I left him at six, we had talked for close on two hours without more than the most casual reference to events of the war. “A keen patriot, like all the rest of these young Britons who have flocked home from overseas to fight for their country,” I reflected as I sauntered down through Green Park; “but certainly not keen on his work.” I even speculated as to whether or not Horne might be in some sort of trouble in the service. Nothing else seemed to account for the man’s reticence regarding everything connected with his special activities.