“I see.  Well, my dear, it is your idea.  Is John going to drive you out?”

“No.  He wanted to.  But I’ll have to find the Sergeant and take him with me.”

“In the baker’s cart?”

“What a good idea!  I would never have thought of that.  And I’ve always wanted to ride in a baker’s cart.  They smell so crusty.”

So it was really the professor’s fault that Bainbridge was scandalized by the sight of young Mrs. Spence jogging comfortably along through the outskirts in a bread cart driven by the one-time Sergeant Edward Timms.

“And him so silly with havin’ her,” said Mrs. Beatty (who first noticed them), “that he didn’t know a French roll from a currant bun.”

Indeed we may as well admit that the gallant Sergeant confused more things that day than rolls and buns.  The latter part of his orderly bread route was strewn thickly with indignant customers.  For the Sergeant was a thoroughgoing fellow quite incapable of a divided interest.

“You can tell me the details of the story as we go along,” Desire said, “so that I shan’t be interrupting your work at all.”

The dazzled Sergeant agreed and immediately delivered two whites instead of one brown and forgot the tickets.

“Well, you see,” he said, “it was this way.  We went over there together, him and me.  And we hadn’t known each other, so to speak, not intimate.  You didn’t know him yourself at all, did you?”

Desire shook her head.

“He was a queer one.  Willin’ as could be to do what he was told, but forgettin’ what it was, regular.  Just naturally no good, like, except with the fiddle.  I will say, that with that there instrument he was a Paderwooski—­yes, mam!  By the time our outfit got into them trenches the boys was just clean dippy about him.  They kind of took turns dry-nursin’ him and remindin’ him of the things he’d got to do, and doin’ them for him when they could put it over.  I’ll tell you this—­it’s my private suspicion that more than one chap went west tryin’ to keep the bullets offen him!  Not that they were crazy about him exactly, but that fiddle of his had got them goin’.  ’Twasn’t only the fiddle he played on, either.  Anything would do.  That there chap could play you into any kind of dashed mood he liked and out of it again.  Put more pep into you with a penny whistle than Sousy’s band or a bottle of rum.  Ring you out like a dishrag, he could, and hang you out to dry.  Gee!  He could do anything—­just anything!”

(It was here that the bun episode occurred.)

“Well,—­he got buried.  Parapet blown in.  And when they got him out he was—­hurt some.” (The Sergeant remembered that one must not shock the ladies.)

“That was all I would have known about it,” he went on, “only we happen to turn up in hospital together.  I wakes up one mornin’ and finds him in the next cot.  He was supposed to be recoverin’ but was somehow botchin’ the job.