"Absolute friends," he mused. "Understanding everything the other chap means, or doesn't mean. Not minding if he's ratty sometimes; being ratty yourself if you want to, and going off on your own, knowing it'll be all right whenever you come back. Good times or rotten times, always with him. Not seeing each other for ages, perhaps. Then finding him just the same. Caring for all the things you're keenest about; barring the same things. I don't think it could be ever exactly like that with a girl." "Never," murmured Mrs. Cartwright; "the girl will be more to you or less to you, but not the same." "A girl would never be more to me," said young Awdas, and now his voice sounded almost normal. He broke off suddenly, and turned to her protestingly. "Mrs. Cartwright, I don't know what you must think of me. Keeping you up like this----Good Lord! it's three o'clock. Sitting there, catching cold----?" "I'm never cold." "And I'm all right now. Please--please do go to bed." Mrs. Cartwright smiled obstinately. "My good young man, I am on night-duty. You called me 'Sister' yourself when I came in. I am going to be 'Sister' for once." "You're too good," he said, with a sigh of obvious relief that she was not going. "I couldn't sleep ... but why should you miss yours?" "I couldn't sleep now, either; I couldn't have slept. I'd only just finished working when you called out. I shall stay"--she tucked the dressing-gown a little more closely about her--"and----No, I won't have a cigarette. I'll light one for you, however. And here's your drink, and I shall just stay and talk to you until you go to sleep." "Too good," he said again, taking the cigarette from her hand and giving her a shyly grateful glance. "I've been bucking no end--I don't know why--I don't generally talk a lot." She knew it; knew also that the distraught boy would not have talked to a man as he had let himself babble, almost hysterically, to her. (It is only women, the so-called talkative sex, who could give statistics of how much men talk, and of what they will talk, upon occasion!) Up to that night, he had not exchanged a dozen sentences with her since they had been staying at the hotel. That same evening, when Mrs. Cartwright and his friend Ross had chipped each other in the _salon_ over her "Manual of Courtship," had been the first occasion that Awdas had found himself sitting next to this tall countrywoman of his. But now he turned his eyes upon her as if she were all that is meant by the word Home. These wakeful, solitary, strange hours had made them friends such as two years of ordinary companionship could not have seen them. Both knew that never again could they be mere hotel acquaintances.