Somebody has presumably bribed some one at the Admiralty. Uncle Francis
tipped me the wink. You've evidently quite made your peace there, Roger,
so congratulations again."
This hint of a decoration was gratifying enough, and to hear, on top of
it, his assurance that my dear old uncle had really opened his heart
again nearly upset me disgracefully. I was evidently still a little
weaker than I realised. However, Jack was tact itself and the talk turned
to every-day matters.
He had been sitting beside me for some little time discussing the war,
the world, and the devil, before it began to strike me as quite
remarkably kind, even for so good a fellow as Jack Whiteclett, to come so
far out of his way to look me up. His own wife was at Portsmouth last I
heard of her, all his other interests were in London, and yet here he
was looking up a cousin in a hospital a couple of hundred miles away from
either place.
"By the way, how long have you got?" I asked.
"A week."
I sat up in my deck chair.
"Only a week! I say this is extraordinarily good of you to come down here
and see me."
"Oh, I wanted to see how heroes bear their wounds," he smiled, but I felt
certain there was something more left unsaid.
"Jack, old chap, what's up? I see in your eye there's something else."
He hesitated a moment and then said,
"There was, but I'm not going to bother you with it now.
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