There was a breathless moment before she answered, but she shook it off with a laugh and her manner lightened.  “There’s nothing to be so solemn about as all that.  We don’t want to wallow.  We’ll have some breakfast—­only you go first and tub.”

He was too young and healthy and clean-blooded to resist the effect upon his spirits which the cold water and the fresh white bathrobe and the hot strong coffee with real cream in it produced.  And the gloomy, remorseful feeling, which he felt it his moral duty to maintain intact, simply leaked away.  She noted the difference in him and half-way through their breakfast she left her chair and came round to him.

“Would you very much mind being kissed now?” she asked.

His answer, with a laugh, was to pull her down upon his knee and hug her up tight in his arms.  They looked rather absurdly alike in those two white bathrobes, though this was an appearance neither of them was capable of observing.  She disengaged herself presently from his embrace and went to find him some cigarettes, refraining from taking one herself from a feeling that he would probably like it better just then if she did not.

Back in her own place over her coffee and toast, she had no difficulty in launching him upon the tale of his own recent experiences.  What the French were like now the war was over; and the Boche he had been living among in the Coblenz area;—­the routine of his army life, the friends he made over there, and so on.  Altogether she built him up immensely in his own esteem.  It was plain he liked having her for a younger sister instead of for an older one, listening so contentedly to his tales, ministering to his momentary wants, visibly wondering at and adoring him.

But she broke the spell when she asked him what he meant to do now.

He turned restlessly in his chair.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “I don’t know what the deuce there is I can do.  Certainly father’s idea of my going back to college and then to medical school afterward, is just plain, rank nonsense.  I’d be a doddering old man before I got through—­thirty years old.  I should think that even he would see that.  It will have to be business, I suppose, but if any kind friend comes around and suggests that I begin at the bottom somewhere—­Mr. Whitney, for instance, offering me a job at ten dollars a week in his bank—­I’ll kill him.  I can’t do that.  I won’t.  At the end of about ten days, I’d run amuck.  What I’d really like,” he concluded, “for about a year would be just this.”  His gesture indicated the bathrobe, the easy chair and the dainty breakfast table.  “This, all the morning and a ball-game in the afternoon.  Lord, it will be good to see some real baseball again.  We’ll go to a lot of games this summer.  What are the Sox going to be like this year?”

She discussed the topic expertly with him and with a perfectly genuine interest, at some length.  “Oh, it would be fun,” she finished with a little sigh, “only I shan’t be there, you know.  At least I don’t think I shall.”  Then before he could ask her why not, she added in sharper focus, “I can’t go home, Rush.”