happened to recognize each
other. I didn't want you to hate me for having spoiled it. That's all."

She gave him the minute or two he evidently needed for turning this over
in his mind. Then she turned her back on the window she had withdrawn to
and began again.

"I used to be just a big sister to you, of course. Ever so superior, I
guess, and a good bit of a prig. And all this time over there in France
with nothing but my letters and that silly picture of me in the khaki
frame, I suppose you have been thinking of me, well,--as a sort of nice
angel. I'm not either, really. I don't want to be either.

"I want to be somebody you feel would understand anything; somebody you
could tell anything to. So that it would work the other way as well.
Because I've got to have somebody to tell things to,--troubles, and
worries. And I've been hoping, ever since your letter came, that it would
turn out to be you."

"What sort of troubles?" He shot the question in rather tensely.

There was a breathless moment before she answered, but she shook it off
with a laugh and her manner lightened. "There's nothing to be so solemn
about as all that. We don't want to wallow. We'll have some
breakfast--only you go first and tub."

He was too young and healthy and clean-blooded to resist the effect upon
his spirits which the cold water and the fresh white bathrobe and the hot
strong coffee with real cream in it produced. And the gloomy, remorseful
feeling, which he felt it his moral duty to maintain intact, simply
leaked away. She noted the difference in him and half-way through their
breakfast she left her chair and came round to him.

"Would you very much mind being kissed now?" she asked.

His answer, with a laugh, was to pull her down upon his knee and hug
her up tight in his arms. They looked rather absurdly alike in those
two white bathrobes, though this was an appearance neither of them was
capable of observing. She disengaged herself presently from his embrace
and went to find him some cigarettes, refraining from taking one
herself from a feeling that he would probably like it better just then
if she did not.

Back in her own place over her coffee and toast, she had no difficulty in
launching him upon the tale of his own recent experiences. What the
French were like now the war was over; and the Boche he had been living
among in the Coblenz area;--the routine of his army life, the friends he
made over there, and so on. Altogether