"You poor dear!" she said, when Edith went to her. "What on earth's happened? The cable only said—honest, dearie, I feel like a dog!"
"They don't like me. That's all," she replied wearily, and picked up her hat and jacket from a chair. But Mabel was curious. Uncomfortable, too, as she had said. She slipped an arm round Edith's waist.
"Say the word and I'll throw them down," she cried. "It looks like dirty work to me. And you're thin. Honest, dearie, I mean it."
Her loyalty soothed the girl's sore spirit.
"I don't know what's come over me," she said. "I've tried hard enough. But I'm always tired. I—I think it's being so close to the war."
Mabel stared at her. There was a war. She knew that. The theatrical news was being crowded to a back page to make space for disagreeable diagrams and strange, throaty names.
"I know. It's fierce, isn't it?" she said.
Edith took her home, and they talked far into the night. She had slipped Cecil's picture into the wardrobe before she turned on the light. Then she explained the situation.
"It's pep they want, is it?" said Mabel at last. "Well, believe me, honey, I'll give it to them. And as long as I've got a cent it's yours."
They slept together in Edith's narrow bed, two slim young figures delicately flushed with sleep. As pathetic, had they known it, as those other sleepers in their untidy billets across the channel. Almost as hopeless too. Dwellers in the neutral ground.