  Dedicated to George E. Andrews on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
Submitted to a special issue for this occasion. We use Andrews' notion of a
`signed partition' (i.e. partition where some parts are allowed to be negative)
to interpret the G\"ollnitz--Gordon sum, and then provide a bijective map
between these signed partitions and the usual G\"ollnitz--Gordon partitions
(partitions with difference at least two between parts, and no consecutive even
parts).
