“I shall positively never call you anything else but Miss Caroline while you permit me to address you at all—­understand it—­I’ve associated with your boy too long.  Well, I did do four years of fighting, and I was mustered out with the rank of Major.  You might as well know it now as later.  You’ll have longer to forget it.  I wish I could forget it myself.  Not the fact, for I should fight again as long and try to fight harder in the same cause, but the hellishness of it—­the damnable, inhuman obscenity of it—­I should like to forget.  I never said so before, Miss Caroline,—­there was no one to say it to,—­but it made me old before my time.  Why, I could almost be a son of yours, if you will pardon that minor brutality, and the thing is aging me to this day.  I helped to kill your young men and your old men, but you ought to know that I didn’t do it for holiday sport.  The first one of your men I saw dead lay alone by the roadside, a boy, foolishly young, with a tired face that was still smiling.  He’d fallen there as if sleep had overtaken him on the march.  Our column had halted, and I went to him.  It must have taken a full minute for me to realize that this was dignified war and not the murder of a boy in a homely gray uniform.  When I did realize it, I was so weakened that I broke down and cried.  I was a private then.  I covered his face, and got up strong enough to assault two other privates who had found my snivelling funny.  One of them went to the field hospital, and I went under arrest when I’d finished with the other.  You ought to know, Miss Caroline, that the sight of thousands of your other dead never moved me to any merriment.  I tried to be a good soldier, but I felt the death pains of every fallen man I saw.  I didn’t stop to note the color of his uniform.  Miss Caroline—­”

I waited until I had made her look at me.

“The war is over, you know.  Suppose you forget me as a soldier and take me as a man.  Really, I believe we ought to know each other better.”

Clem had once found occasion to say, “When Miss Cahline tek th’ notion to shine huh eyes up, she sho’ is a highly illuminous puhsonality.”

I saw then what he meant, for Miss Caroline had “shined” her eyes, and they flooded me with a distracting medley of lights.  I thought she struggled very uncertainly with herself.  Her eyes shifted from my face to the empty sleeve.  Twice before that evening—­I remembered it had been when she spoke so enigmatically of the lumber industry—­her eyes had rested there briefly, discreetly, but in all sympathy.  Now the look was different.  It wavered.  At one instant I seemed to read regret that I had come off so well—­her eyes flickered suggestively to my remaining arm.

“Be fair,” I said; “did I not drink your toast?”

I thought she wavered at this, for a blush deeper than all the others suffused her.

“Besides,” I continued warningly, “you are within the enemy’s lines now, and you may find me a help.  Come!” and I held out my hand.