“Hello,” called Frank.  His handsome face, though somewhat thinner than the girls remembered, was better looking than ever and he had developed a trick of flinging the hair back from his forehead that the girls thought immensely attractive,

Roy, who had seated himself on the railing of the porch and was swinging his feet, looked more unchanged than either of the boys, though the girls were soon to find out that he had changed the most.

Will, who had settled Amy in a chair and was sitting cross-legged on the floor at her feet, was gazing up at the girl with his heart in his eyes.  As for Amy—­ well, the girls had never known she could look so radiant.

“Have a seat,” invited Roy, rising lazily to the dignity of his six feet as Betty and Grace came up on the porch.  “It would seem like old times to see you girls perched on the railing.”

“I’ll have you know, sir,” said Betty very demurely, as she pulled Grace down beside her on the top step of the porch, “that we have quite grown up since you have been away.  We will sit here where we can get a good view of you all.”

“And we want to hear about everything you have done over there,” broke in Amy eagerly.  “Please, everything—­ right from the beginning.”

The boys fidgeted, looked dismayed, and Roy burst forth in protest.

“Oh, I say!” he cried.  “We’ll do anything else for you, but please don’t ask us to do that.”

“We don’t want to talk about ourselves or the war,” muttered Frank, almost as if to himself.  “We want to forget about it—­ if we can.”

“You see,” Will explained, and there was a stern note in his young voice, “we worked and we sweated and we fought.  We lived under conditions week after week and month after month that it makes us shudder even to think of now.  For months we lived in a perfect inferno—­ and do you know what our idea of heaven was then?”

They said nothing and he went on in a lighter tone.

“It was just to get back alive and, well, to God’s country and you girls—­ to sit for hours, days if we could, where we could look at you and listen to you and not do a thing but just be happy.  I wonder if you can understand that?”

“Of course, we can, Will!” cried Betty, impulsively reaching over and laying a hand on the boy’s arm.  “You have earned the right to sit and be amused, and we’ll do it till you cry aloud for mercy.  And you needn’t tell us a single word about yourselves until you get good and ready.”

“You’re a brick, Betty,” said Will warmly, laying his hand over her little one.  “I might have known we could count on you.”

“By the way,” Roy broke in suddenly, his eye on the basket of eatables that the girls had prepared for their adventure, “what’s in that hamper, anyway?  If it’s anything to eat, let’s have it.”

Betty pulled the basket over to her, lifted the cover and passed it over to the ravenous one.