As I made no answer, he mumbled, mysteriously: “I do. I ’aven’t valeted ’im for nothink.” I still made no answer, and the mumble ceased. As yet I had noticed him only as the returned traveler notices the faithful old dog that greets him by lifting his eyes adoringly and wagging his tail. I saw now that the intervening two and a half years had aged him. He had grown white and waxy; his thin gray hair was thinner. A trembling, like that of a delicately poised leaf on a day when there is little wind, shook his hands, and the left corner of his lower lip had the pathetic quiver of a child’s when it is about to sag in a great weeping. As I had paid him so little attention on the dock, I picked up the hand resting on his knee and pressed it. He responded with a long, harsh breath which, starting as a sigh of comfort, became something inarticulately emotional. “Oh, Slim! I’ve got ye back, ’aven’t I?” “Seems like it, Lovey.” I laughed without feeling mirthful. “Ye look awful, don’t ye?” “I suppose I do.” “But it don’t make no difference to me, it don’t. I’d rather ’ave ye all chawed up like this than not ’ave ye at all.” “Thank you, Lovey.” “Them wars is awful things. Why don’t they stop ’em?” He continued, without waiting for an explanation: “It’s all along o’ them blamed Germans. The cheek o’ them—to go and fight Englishmen! There was a German in the ’at-shop in the Edgware Road used to ’ang round me somethin’ fierce; and now I believe he wasn’t nothink but a-spyin’ on me. Don’t you think he was, Slim?” “I think very likely.” “Makes my blood run cold, it does, the times I’ve took ’im into a little tea-shop in Great Hatfield Street—and me a-treatin’ on ’im, like. If I ’adn’t ’ad luck I might be lookin’ like you by this time. Ain’t it awful to be one-eyed, sonny?” “Oh, I’m getting used to it.” “Used to it till you looks in the glass, I expect. Get a fright when ye do that, don’t you? But it’s all right, Slim. It wouldn’t matter to me if you was a worse looker than y’are. I wouldn’t turn ye down, neither, not if it was for all the doctors in the world. Not but what he’s been very attentive to me while you was away. I don’t make no complaint about that. Bit finicky about socks and ’andkerchiefs always the same color—and ye couldn’t see ’is socks most o’ the time—only when he pulled up his trouser leg a-purpose—but a good spender and not pokin’ ’is nose into my affairs. I’ll say all that for ’im; but if he was to ask my ’and in marriage, like, and I could get you, Slim—all bunged up as y’are now and everything!—well, I know what I’d say.” Too miserable to reject this bit of sympathy, I said, merely, “Unfortunately, Lovey, every one may not be of your opinion.” “I d’n’ know about that,” he protested. “Seems to me everybody would be if you could make ’em understand, like.” There was nothing offensive in this, coming as it did from a deep affection, but, as it had gone far enough, I turned my attention to the streets.