"Can't help it."
"I say, look here; go and tell your father you are coming down to the bungalow to keep me company to-night, because I don't like to be alone."
"No, you stop and sleep here. Then you will not have the bother of walking down there."
"No," said Harry firmly; "father's out, and I'm sure he wouldn't like me to leave the house when he's away. Come and sleep at our place to-night, there's a good chap."
"Very well," said Phra. "Come with me and speak to father."
"All right," said Harry, coolly enough, and they walked through the moonlit garden together, when, as they passed toward the palace, the incongruity of it all seemed to strike the boy, and he laughed softly.
"I say, how comic it all seems! Here's your father a great Eastern king—king over this big country, and yet he's only your father, and I'm going with you to talk to him just as if he was nobody at all."
"But he is," said Phra thoughtfully. "He's very different with other people, but he talks to you, and about you to me, just as if you were a—I mean a boy like I am."
"Well, it's very nice of him," said Harry. "I've never done anything to make him like me. I never went down on my knees and held my hands on each side of my face, and seemed as if I were going to rub the skin off my nose on the ground because he's a great king."
"No; he laughed about it one day, and said that's why he liked you to be my playfellow."