"All night, why?" asked the other, turning her head to look curiously at the speaker. In that moment Pam found herself wondering if the girl was really as supercilious as she looked--or whether the expression was caused by her disdainful eyebrows. "Why! But you wouldn’t leave a person like that, would you?" Pamela opened her big, grey-blue eyes as she answered with this question. "Oh, yes. If it seemed to be the most sensible thing to do. I should put him in the safest place possible--then I would go and find help." "He would have fallen down," said Pamela decidedly, "he wasn’t conscious, and he couldn’t hold on. One daren’t be responsible for leaving him." The other girl shrugged her shoulders slightly. "Oh, well--where is the sense to kill two people instead of one? You are the most important." "_I!_ Not so sure," Pam laughed. "I’m only a woman, and this child will be a man some day. We’ve got too many women in England as it is--heaps too many, and we want all the boys we can get, they are fearfully important." "Oh, for that perhaps! I was thinking of birth. You are Pamela Romilly, and your family is distinguished; he is but a common child." Pamela was veritably startled by such an odd remark. The "common child" appeared to have much the same feeling, to judge by his round eyes. He looked at Pam--to whom he was devoted--anything she said was right, but he did not understand much about it anyway. "That sounds rather like the Middle Ages--or the people of the French Court before the big Revolution, doesn’t it?" she said cautiously, not wishing to offend this young person of strange views who had helped her so grandly out of a tight corner; "you see we don’t have that sort of opinions nowadays. At least one never hears them--especially since the war. It brought us all close together. Our brother fought--and Mrs. Ensor’s brother fought, and there you are. We’ve all got on the same ground and we want to stay like that--you can’t put people back when they’ve done ripping things, can you?" Reube closed his eyes. These were the sentiments he was used to from Romillys, Shards, Ensors, and Badgers, and all the rest of the valley folk; he could understand that. "Did your brother fight?" asked the strange girl quickly. "Oh, yes--Royal Navy--he’s Lieutenant on the destroyer _Spite_. Dad’s a sailor, you know, he commands the battleship _Medusa_, one of the new ones." There was a pause, then the other girl rose to her feet. "My father was killed," she said in a sort of fierce, stifled voice. Pamela jumped up also. She was shocked through all her sensitive being. "Oh," she exclaimed. "Oh, I’m so horribly sorry. I oughtn’t to have talked about the war, one never knows. How splendid--how utterly splendid!"