She brought her machine in line with one of the four rows, checked her arrival and walked wearily over to her quarters. She had been out that morning since four, she had seen sights and heard sounds which a delicately nurtured young woman, who three years before had shuddered at the sight of a spider, could never in her wildest nightmare imagine would be brought to her sight or hearing. She was weary, body and soul, sick with the nausea which is incomparable to any other. And now she was at the end of it. Her application for long leave had followed the smashing up of her airman brother and his compulsory retirement in England. And yet she could not bear the thought of leaving all this; the horror and the wonder of it were alike fascinating. She felt the same pangs of remorse she had experienced on the one occasion she had run away from school. She branded herself as a deserter and looked upon those who had the nerve and will to stay on with something of envy. Her plain-spoken friend was sitting on her bed in a kimono as the girl came in. "Well?" she asked. "Well, what?" asked Vera irritably. "Are you sorry you are leaving us?" "I haven't left yet," said the girl, sitting down and unstrapping her leather leggings slowly. "You don't go till to-morrow, that's true," said the other girl calmly, "and how have you rounded off all your little--friendships?" There was just the slightest of pauses between the two last words. "You mean Lieutenant MacTavish?" asked Vera distraitly. "I mean Tam," said the girl with a nod. "Exactly what do you mean by 'rounded off'?" The other girl laughed. "Well, there are many ways of a friendship," she smiled; "there's the 'If-you-come-to-my-town-look-me-up' way. There's the 'You'll-write-every-day' way--and--" She hesitated again. "Go on," said Vera calmly. "And there's--well, the conventional way." Vera smiled. "I can't imagine Tam doing anything conventional," she said. Elizabeth jumped up with a laugh, walked to the little bare dressing-table and began brushing her hair. "Why do you laugh?" asked Vera. "The whole thing's so curious," replied the girl. "Here's a man who is head-over-heels in love with you--" "In love with me!" Vera Laramore went red and white by turns and lost, for a moment, her grasp of the situation, then grew virtuously indignant, which was a tactical error for if she were innocent of such a thought as that which her friend expressed she should have been either amused or curious. "How can you talk such rubbish? Tam and I are jolly good friends. He is a real fine man, as straight as a die and as plucky as he's straight. He has more sense, more judgment--" She was breathless. "Spare me the catalogue of his virtues," said Elizabeth drily. "I grant he is perfection and therefore unlovable. All that I asked you out of sheer idle curiosity was: How is your friendship to be rounded off?"