She looked at the face that was falling at last into lines of composure; no longer a white mask of strain and anguish. Colour was coming back, and a smile took the place of that intently thinking ghost behind the blue eyes. He lifted that small head, set so eagle-wise upon the wide shoulders, breathed more deeply; and she knew that it was she who had restored him, this fallen cloud-sweeper. Fancifully she thought of his daring job as something still verging on the super-human; after all, these flying lads, with their freedom of one element more, are the half-gods of our time. She thought of that myth of the other half-god Antaëus, who, to gain fresh life, must draw it from the touch of earth; and she remembered that Woman (that last creature to be civilized) is still generations nearer than man to the healing soil. Yes; she had healed him. Without showing him that she did so, she studied his face, with its soft fruit-like oval that does not survive the first quarter of a century. Twenty-two! He seemed, as most young soldiers do nowadays, more than his age. Yet in some ways he looked younger. After a puff or two of cigarette-smoke had risen into the air, she asked gently, "Why did you say, just now, that a girl could never mean more to you than friendship?" He said simply, "I don't know. Perhaps it is because I don't really know any girls much. They've never come my way." "Not?" she exclaimed, scarcely believing this. He said quite seriously: "You know it makes a lot of difference when one hasn't any sisters. I haven't any; there were just three of us; me, and my brother in the Navy, and the Nipper--the youngest. (Cadet Corps.) My people live in the country, you know--Kent. It's not a bad old place; orchards and a moat for punting about on when we were kids, and the paddock. We had quite a decent time. But there were no girls in the house." Mrs. Cartwright suggested "Other people's sisters?" "Not often. My mother used to try and get girls to stay with her sometimes, but----" He moved his wide shoulders. "It was rather a wash-out. When there aren't other girls to come for, you know. There's a sort of feeling of their having been dragged in. Everybody's shy and stiff. At least, they were; the girls who came. I suppose that's why I haven't thought much of girls. They always seemed a nuisance, and self-conscious, you know. Wooden. Glad when it was time for them to go, and I can tell you _I_ was. They were thundering difficult to talk to." Mrs. Cartwright, always ready to hear of the bringing-up of boys, gave thanks inwardly that her Keith and Reggie possessed countless girl-cousins who were to them as sisters; creatures dispossessed of glamour, but a channel into those fields where glamour ripens. Then she said, softly, to this other boy: "But when you went away from Home, when you came up to Town, and--oh, all that sort of thing, like other young men of your age, surely you met plenty of girls who were--well! Easy enough to talk to?"