Then, when I had got to the blessed home--a large, new, red-brick building surrounded by sprouts of laurel--there was some mistake about my having come. They didn't seem to realise that I had been asked to visit a wounded officer. They showed me into an awful little bleak waiting-room with nothing in it but a gas-fireplace and a framed photograph of a lot of nurses in a group, with Miss Gates in the middle with her hair done like they used to when mother was a girl. I waited for what seemed like an hour, which, of course, made me furious. I should have been far better employed sitting at home going on embroidering Nancy's chemise-top or darning my own stockings or something really productive like that, instead of hanging on waiting until this wretched matron-fiancée person of Mr. Lascelles's chose to think that I had been there long enough. I wondered why a woman like that with a big nursing home of her own and what they call one of the most sacred professions should choose to go and get herself engaged to be married. And at her age, too! Just as I was thinking this the door opened, and in came the so-called fair fiancée herself--Miss Gates--the matron. She had a little starchy cap perched on her brown hair with lots of grey in it--I mean the hair, not the cap--and she also had on a business-like looking navy blue alpaca gown with little lawn collar and cuffs, but no apron. What a very different sort of bride she'll make from Nancy! Well, in she came and shook hands very briskly with me and said: "Oh, yes, Mr. Lascelles does expect you; so I think I may permit you to see him for a few minutes." Permit you, you know! That made me so annoyed that I didn't do what I intended to do--namely, ask if I might congratulate her on her engagement to our old friend. Yes, I say old friend because when a person has been billeted on you, you get to know him better in a week or two than you would get to know in years and years some young man that you only saw at hockey matches or at Badminton or subscription dances and that sort of thing. Well, led by this matron, I went upstairs to an upper landing that went all round the well of the staircase. There was a sound of playing the piano and singing "When the Girls come up to Town----" from one of the rooms where I suppose a lot of them were, and a quite young youth came out in very beautiful grey mufti and only one leg, poor darling, hopping and holding on to the banisters and laughing at some one behind him. "Now, Mr. Tracey, Mr. Tracey," the matron called, "where are your crutches?" "Oh, Sister, I do hate the beastly things," said this young wounded officer in a very drawly sort of voice, looking hard through a monocle at me. "They simply ruin the set of one's coat, don't you know." "Once a nut, always a nut, I suppose," said Miss Gates, and then she opened a door and said, "Here's a visitor to see you, Frankie."