The padre filled himself a glass of whisky and soda and lit his pipe. He looked round with a smile of triumph. Most of us applauded him. He deserved it. The story was one of his best imaginative efforts. I suppose the applause encouraged him to go further. “I’ll give you his address if you like,” he said to the A.P.M. “He’s working on a French farm and quite happy. But I don’t see that you can possibly arrest him without getting the whole medical profession on your back. They said he was dead, you see, and, as Mackintosh will tell you, they never own up to making mistakes.” IV ~~ THE SECOND BASS “Be careful, Bates,” said Miss Willmot; “we don’t want your neck broken.” “No fear, miss,” said Lance-Corporal Bates; “I’m all right.” Lance-Corporal Bates had three gold bars on the sleeve of his tunic. He might fairly be reckoned a man of courage. His position, when Miss Willmot spoke to him, demanded nerve. He stood on the top rail of the back of a chair, a feeble-looking chair. The chair was placed on a table which was inclined to wobble, because one of its legs was half an inch shorter than the other three. Sergeant O’Rorke, leaning on the table, rested most of his weight on the seat of the chair, thereby balancing Bates and preventing an upset. Miss Willmot sat on the corner of the table, so that it wobbled very little. Bates, perilously balanced, hammered a nail, the last necessary nail, into the wall through the topmost ray of a large white star. Then he crept cautiously down. Standing beside Miss Willmot he surveyed the star. “Looks a bit like Christmas, don’t it, miss?” he said. “The glitters on it,” said Sergeant O’Rorke, “is the beautifullest that ever was seen. The diamonds on the King’s Crown wouldn’t be finer.” The star hung on the wall of the canteen opposite the counter. It was made of cotton wool pasted on cardboard. The wool had been supplied by a sympathetic nurse from a neighbouring hospital. It was looted from the medical stores. The frosting, which excited Sergeant O’Rorke’s admiration, was done with sugar. It was Miss Nelly Davis, youngest and merriest of Miss Willmot’s helpers, who suggested the sugar, when the powdered glass ordered from England failed to arrive. “There can’t be any harm in using it,” she said. “What we’re getting now isn’t sugar at all, it is fine gravel. A stone of it wouldn’t sweeten a single urn of tea.” Miss Willmot took the sugar from her stores as she accepted the looted cotton-wool, without troubling to search for excuse or justification. She was a lady of strong will. When she made up her mind that the Christmas decorations of her canteen were to be the best in France she was not likely to stick at trifling breaches of regulations.