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and we’ve got money for a nice house, and a car, ’n holidays, and after that we even save a little. And I been thinking,” he said quietly, “I been a bloody squirt not to have done something to find out about them other chaps, and see how they was getting on. They were bloody good to me when I needed it.”
    He pulled out his cigarette case, and handed it to her. She took one and he placed one between his lips, andfumbled with his lighter in the left hand, and lit them. “Well, there we are,” he said. In the dim, moonlit garden there was privacy. “I’ve had it now. In a year’s time there won’t be no more of me. I don’t want to go out and leave these strings hanging loose. I want to find out what happened to them other three, case any of them wants a hand, or something.”
    She stared at him, bewildered. This was a different Jackie from the one she knew, and she distrusted change. Injuries such as his when they went bad made people funny in the head, sometimes; this business of wanting to look for his companions in the prison ward seemed very odd to her. She tried to head him off.
    “They’ll be all right,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t worry too much over it.”
    “I won’t,” he said. “I’m just going to find out and make sure they’re all right, so as I know.”
    She said helplessly, “What are you going to do, then? Write a letter?”
    “I dunno an address for any of them,” he said. “No good writing to the hospital, not after all these years. I’d better try the Air Ministry to get the pilot’s address, and the War Office for the corporal, I suppose. I dunno what to do about the nigger.”
    “You’ll never find them after all this time,” she said. “How would you ever find a nigger that was in the American Army, after the war, and all?”
    “I dunno,” he said. There was a long pause, and then he said, “I want to have a try.”
    She sat deep in thought for a few moments. He was a bit queer, she decided. Clinically speaking, she was right; theobsession was probably related to his lesion. That did not help her in her immediate problem, what to do about it. She knew enough about her husband not to cross him directly; when once he got a fixed idea he held on to it like a dog with a bone. Moreover, for the first time in years she felt he needed her. She said, “What were they like, these three? Was there anything particular about them?”
    He grinned. “Only they were all in such a bloody awful mess—like me.” He turned his head to her; in the white light she saw the gleam of his great wound. “Like me to tell you about them?”
    She said, “Yes.”
    He got up from his chair. “I’m just going in to spill some of this beer. Shall I bring out a rug when I come?”
    It was the first time he had offered to do anything for her in a long time. She said, “Please. It’s getting kind of chilly out here; but it’s nice.”
    He went into the house, and came back presently, and handed her the rug. She wrapped it around herself and settled down to listen to him talking. They sat there on the lawn in the warm summer night, in the quiet grace of the moon, and the stars faint in the bright light. It was windless, still, and silent. Around them, in the dormitory suburb, the world slept.
    This paratroop corporal, Jackie said, was “a proper card.” He was a young chap, not more than twenty, a short, stocky young man with a thick mat of curly red hair; he wore it cut short in the Army style, but even so there was a lot of it. He had the grey eyes that go with it,and like most red-haired young men, he liked a bit of fun.
    His name was Duggie Brent. In full, his name was Douglas Theodore Brent, but he considered Theodore to be a sissy name, and hid it up as much as possible. His father was a butcher in Romsey, and a lay reader at the Methodist chapel; when his son arrived, it seemed proper to christen him the Gift of God. In later years his father reconsidered that.
    In fact, there