Remembering this now, I offered my cousin a sympathetic cigarette, which
he, shaking himself free from care, accepted; after which he began to
borrow ten pounds--an achievement which, I am proud to say, cost him nearly
twenty minutes' hard labour.

Not so very long afterwards Adela and I had a honeymoon, followed by a
picture-postcard from Herbert. He said he was sorry he hadn't been there to
throw boots at us, but he was convalescing on the Cornish Riviera, the
exact spot being marked with a cross; also one could not send money by
postcard, but I was not to think he was forgetting about that fiver he had
borrowed.

The first part of this document caused Adela to wonder vaguely if wounded
officers ought to convalesce in chimney-pots, but the last words gave me
some twinges of a more sincere alarm. Was Herbert's delusion a permanency,
or merely a slip of the pen?

"Adela," I decided, "let's ask Herbert to dinner as soon as ever he leaves
the roofs of the British Riviera."

Then one day, when I was writing letters in the Mess, he strolled in.
"Hullo!" he said, "where's the C.O.? What?... Oh, thanks awfully, and ...
Oh, I say, good Lord! I owe you three quid, don't I?" and he drifted out
abstractedly.

"Three!" I echoed dizzily, as the door banged. I staggered home for the
week-end.

I found Adela having an excited conversation with the telephone in the
hall.