“All right,” said Daintree. “I’ll cut out the rest of his experiences in that shell hole, though, mind you, they’re rather interesting and frightfully poetic the way my wife tells them. After two days our fellows got back into the wood and kept it. The stretcher-bearers found Simcox in his hole and they lugged him down to a Casualty Clearing Station. From that he went to a hospital--the usual round. He had a pretty bad time, first over there, and then, when they could move him, in London. By degrees he got more sane about the photo. He stopped thinking she was any kind of spirit and took to regarding her just as a girl, though a very exceptional kind of girl, of course. He was hopelessly in love with her. Do you think a man really could fall in love with a photo?” “Simcox did,” I said, “so we needn’t discuss that point.” “The chances were, of course,” said Daintree, “that she was some other fellow’s girl, possibly some other fellow’s wife. But Simcox didn’t care. He was too far gone to care for anything except to get that girl. Those morose, shy men are frightfully hard hit in that sort of way, I’m told. That’s what my wife says, anyhow. They get it much worse than we do when they do get it. Simcox would have dragged that girl out of the arms of an archbishop if that was where he found her. Of course he couldn’t go hunting her over England while he was in hospital with a bad leg; but he made up his mind to find out who she was and where she lived as soon as he was well enough to go about. He’d very little to go on--practically nothing. The photo had been cut down so as to fit into the cigarette case, so that there wasn’t even a photographer’s name on it.” “He might have advertised,” I said. “There are papers which go in for that sort of thing, publish rows of reproductions of photographs ‘Found on the battle-field,’ with requests for identification.” “My wife thought of that,” said Daintree, “but Simcox didn’t seem to take to the idea. He said the photo was too sacred a thing to be reproduced in a paper. My own idea is that he was afraid of any kind of publicity. You see, the other fellow might turn up--the fellow who really had a right to the girl.” “How the deuce did he propose to find her?” “I don’t know. He told my wife some rotten yarn about instinct guiding him to her; said he felt sure that the strength of his great love would somehow lead him to her side. He didn’t say that to me, couldn’t, you know. But it’s wonderful what a fellow will say to a woman, if she’s sympathetic, and my wife is. Still, even so, he must be more or less mad to think a thing like that. Mad about the girl. He’s sane enough in every other way.”