"He had no right to call me an idjit," said the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantryman. He was an aggressive, red-visaged man with bristly black hair and stubbly black moustache. "If you'll agree that he wasn't grousing, Penworthy, I'm sure Trevor will apologize for calling you an idiot." And into the nurse's eyes crept the queer smile of the woman learned in the ways of children. "Didn't I say he wasn't grousing? It was only his ignorance?" Doggie responded. "I meant no offence, mate, in what I said." The other growled an acceptance, whereupon the nurse smiled an ironic benediction and moved away. "Where did you get it?" asked Penworthy. Doggie gave the information and, in his turn, made the polite counter-inquiry. Penworthy's bit of shrapnel, which had broken a rib or two, had been acquired just north of Albert. When he left, he said, we were putting it over in great quantities. "That's where the great push is going to be in a few days." "Aren't you sorry you're out of it?" "Me?" The Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantryman shook his head. "I take things as I finds 'em, and I finds this quite good enough." So they chatted and, in the soldier's way, became friends. Later, the surgeon arrived and probed Doggie's wound and hurt him exquisitely, so that the perspiration stood out on his forehead, and his jaws ached afterwards from his clenching of them. While his leg was being dressed he reflected that, a couple of years ago, if anyone had inflicted a twentieth part of such torture on him he would have yelled the house down. He remembered, with an inward grin, the anguished precautions on which he had insisted whenever he sat down in the chair of his expensive London dentist. "It must have hurt like fun," said the nurse, busily engaged with the gauze dressing. "It's all in the day's work," replied Doggie. The nurse pinned the bandage and settled him comfortably in bed. "No one will worry you till dinner-time. You'd better try to have a sleep." So Doggie nodded and smiled and curled up as best he could and slept the heavy sleep of the tired young animal. It was only when he awoke, physically rested and comparatively free from pain, that his mind, hitherto confused, began to work clearly, to straighten out the three days' tangle. Yes, just three days. A fact almost impossible to realize. Till now it had seemed an eternity. He lay with his arms crossed under his head and stared at the blue sky--a soft, comforting English sky. The ward was silent. Only two beds were occupied, one by a man asleep, the other by a man reading a novel. His other room-mates, including his neighbour Penworthy, were so far convalescent as to be up and away, presumably by the life-giving sea, whose rhythmic murmur he could hear. For the first time since he awoke to find himself bandaged up in a strange dug-out, and surrounded by strange faces, did the chaos of his ideas resolve itself into anything like definite memories. Yet many of them were still vague.