He nodded slightly. "Oh, yes; one met those. But----" There crept over his face the look that some think is more often to be seen in these days of Emancipation than in more guarded times; the scrutiny of the young man who is at least as fastidious in his love affairs as the young woman. "They weren't very amusing either--or, probably, I wasn't--to them. Of course, one knows lots of top-hole fellows who were always about with girls. Permanent address: 'Stagedoor, Frivolity,' sort of thing. But when I got leave, I'd just as soon go round with my people, or poor old Ferris, or some other fellow----" He had finished his cigarette, and leant his fair rumpled head back on the pillow. Mrs. Cartwright, watching it, knew suddenly and certainly that--but for his own mother and his nurses at that hospital--she was the first woman who had seen it thus. Then she could hardly check the smile that rose to her lips; for there was stealing over his face a look that made it not merely boyish, but little-boyish. A film was blurring those keen blue eyes; he opened them more widely, precisely as she had seen the eyes of little Keith open widely, obstinately, against her breast when he was dropping with the sleep that he defied. Young Awdas, she saw, was fighting down a well-disguised yawn. For a moment there was silence in the bright, isolated room. Then he said, "Mrs. Cartwright, do go to bed." "I am not sleepy." "No, nor am I," with a drowsy smile. "If you go, I'll get out a book and read until it's time to get up." "Don't do that," she said. "I suppose you wouldn't try and go to sleep for a bit?" "I couldn't." The blue eyes opened again fixedly upon her face. "I----" It seemed in the midst of the sentence that his lashes fell against his cheeks, closely and suddenly as the lashes of her babies used to fall. In the idiom of those old days he was "off," he was "down." Afraid of moving, to snap off the lights, lest she might disturb the sleeper, she sat on, watching that peaceful face, that broad chest heaving rhythmically. She sat, watching him; or letting her glance take in the room with his neat, soldier-like appointments; his folding-case for brushes and shaving-kit, his one photograph (obviously of his mother) in a celluloid glazed frame, his leather writing-case, with his name and the name of his Corps printed in ink on the cover. Her eyes upturned to him, as she sat--thinking ... thinking....