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and rough, she must have been scrubbing somewhere out of sight. She had the air of giving up appearances and expecting nothing. He remembered that both the maids and the nurses had always seemed to have a full-time job, and there were no maids today.
    “Thanks all the same,” he said, “but it’s gone off now, it feels fine.” On a sudden impulse, because she looked plain and didn’t deserve to, he added, “Seeing you must have cured it.”
    “Silly,” she said offhandedly; but she gave him a quick, shy smile as she went on to the next locker.
    “Now then, Spud,” said Reg, suddenly reappearing. “At it again. Ought to be ashamed. Here, I never asked you, what did the old man say about your leg? He was going on long enough.”
    “God knows,” said Laurie. “It was just Greek to me.”
    They put Reg into an airplane splint next day. It supported his arm outwards on a level with his shoulder, flexed at the elbow. Learning not to knock people down as he passed them gave him an occupation. He wrote Madge a long letter. Laurie had his stitches out, and was allowed up. This was his fourth convalescence; there was nothing to it, except that, as usual, he found when he used the crutch again that his arm muscles had gone soft. The stick would come later; he had only graduated to a stick once before.
    In the evening, when he came back to the ward from the kitchen where he had been washing up, he was pleased to notice still more progress in Reg. Not only was he not sitting alone, but he had a grouse. It was plainly a stirring, public and noisy one. His face looked a healthier color already. He was sitting on the end of Neames’s bed. Between Reg and Neames there was always something of a class war; so Laurie realized the grouse must be serious, and he had better be in on it.
    “Hello,” he said. “What’s cooking?”
    “What’s cooking? Eh?” Reg wheeled round, so that Neames had to duck to dodge a scythelike sweep of the splint. “Cor, Spuddy, you wait till you hear. This’ll kill you, this will. Listen to this. Who d’you think they’re sending up here, to do for us ’stead of the maids?”
    “German prisoners?” guessed Laurie. Unlikely as it seemed, he could think of nothing else proportionable to Reg’s fury.
    “Oh, come on, wake up, Spud; what Jerry prisoners do we get? Only the Luftwaffe boys. And God’s truth, I’d rather have a bunch of them. They learn them this Nazi stuff in the schools, they don’t know no better, they’ve been had for suckers but they done their duty the way they see it, same as us. Not like these creeping-Jesus, knock-kneed conchies.”
    Laurie took it in. He whistled.
    “C.o.s? God, that’s going to be a bit embarrassing.”
    “Embarrassing?” said Reg sharply. He usually covered up Laurie’s social gaffes, but this was serious. “Too true it is. Embarrassing for them, the muckers.”
    “One way to look at it,” said Neames, making what was evidently not his first speech in the debate, “they’re mouths the country’s got to feed. If they’re kept in prison producing nothing, who foots the bill? We do. Now here we have the nurses wasting half their time on cleaning, and everyone’s comfort going by the board. No fraternization, that goes without saying. But no obstruction. That’s what I suggest.”
    Reg snorted. “Got it totted up like the petty cash, haven’t you? After all we been through, if I was to see one of them muggers coming up with a soap and flannel to wash me, I’d smack it acrost his face. Don’t worry, we’ll soon have them out of here.”
    There was a growl of assent from the meeting behind him. Laurie listened in mounting depression and dismay; his imagination flinched from the series of excruciating little dramas he saw approaching. He said, “You know, they did some pretty fine ambulance work in the last war, right in the line.”
    “Ah,” said Reg, “that would be the Quakers. Not that I hold with them, but that’s a proper