She smiled gravely. "You are such a boy, Tom. Don't you know that all through life you'll have two kinds of friends: those who will stand by you because they won't believe anything bad about you, and those who will take you for just what you are and still stand by you?"
He scowled thoughtfully at her. "Say, Ardea; I'd just like to know how old you are, anyhow! You say things every once in a while that make me feel as if I were a little kid in knee-breeches."
She laughed in his face. "That is the rudest thing you've said yet! But I don't mind telling you—since I'm to be your sister. I'll be seventeen a little while after you're eighteen."
"Haven't you ever been foolish, like other girls?" he asked.
She laughed again, more heartily than ever. "They say I'm the silliest tomboy in our house, at Carroll. But I have my lucid intervals, I suppose, like other people, and this is one of them. I am going to stand by you to-morrow morning, when you have to tell your father and mother—that is, if you want me to."
His gratitude was too large for speech, but he tried to look it. Then the porter came to make her section down, and he had to say good night and vanish.