"Then you aren't asleep," she faltered. "Are you—reading?"
The older girl turned and gazed, half blankly, at the dark-eyed face in that mist of loosened hair.
"Yes," she drawled, for all that her hands and hunched-up knees were bookless. "Yes, I'm reading. I'm having a little squint at this puzzle-scroll they call Life."
She made a peremptory gesture and Barbara crept in beside her.
"I—may I turn off the light?" she asked.
Miriam snapped the button.
"I couldn't sleep," Barbara began presently, in a quaintly small voice. "And I—I wanted—Miriam, I've acted so like an unschooled, half-grown girl to-day that it has perplexed and worried me! From the moment when I first recognized him and became so—tangled up—I've just chattered and chattered. You don't think I'm utterly frivolous and unstable, do you?"
"Haven't you always been famed for your poise?" came back the uncompromising voice she knew so well.
"Are you—you aren't laughing at me, are you?" she hesitated. "Because I don't think I am in the mood to be laughed at. And I have poise. I am not a child. But looking back now, I can't quite account for all my—shall I call it cordiality? Don't you believe, Miriam, that it was because I wanted to make up, a little, for the way I treated him when he was a boy?"
"Maybe!" agreed Miriam, unenthusiastically.