"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,