She looked up at him, perplexed, undecided.

“Are you making fun of Brooklyn, or of me?”

“Of neither.  May I come?”

“If you care to,” she said.

They walked on together up Fulton Street, following the stream of returning sight-seers and business men, passing recruiting stations where red-legged infantry of the 14th city regiment stood in groups reading the extras just issued by the Eagle and Brooklyn Times concerning the bloody riot in Baltimore and the attack on the 6th Massachusetts.  Everywhere, too, soldiers of the 13th, 38th, and 70th regiments of city infantry, in blue state uniforms, were marching about briskly, full of the business of recruiting and of their departure, which was scheduled for the twenty-third of April.

Already the complexion of the Brooklyn civic sidewalk crowds was everywhere brightened by military uniforms; cavalrymen of the troop of dragoons attached to the 8th New York, jaunty lancers from the troop of lancers attached to the 69th New York, riflemen in green epaulettes and facings, zouaves in red, blue, and brown uniforms came hurrying down the stony street to Fulton Ferry on their return from witnessing a parade of the 14th Brooklyn at Fort Greene.  And every figure in uniform thrilled the girl with suppressed excitement and pride.

Berkley, eyeing them askance, began blandly: 

  “Citizens of martial minds,
  Uniforms of wondrous kinds,
  Wonderful the sights we see—­
  Ailsa, you’ll agree with me.”

“Are you utterly without human feeling?” she demanded.  “Because, if you are, there isn’t the slightest use of my pretending to be civil to you any longer.”

“Have you been pretending?”

“I suppose you think me destitute of humour,” she said, “but there is nothing humourous about patriotism and self-sacrifice to me, and nothing very admirable about those who mock it.”

Her cheeks were deeply flushed; she looked straight ahead of her as she walked beside him.

Yet, even now the swift little flash of anger revealed an inner glimpse to her of her unaltered desire to know this man; of her interest in him—­of something about him that attracted her but defied analysis—–­or had defied it until, pursuing it too far one day, she had halted suddenly and backed away.

Then, curiously, reflectively, little by little, she retraced her steps.  And curiosity urged her to investigate in detail the Four Fears—­fear of the known in another, fear of the unknown in another, fear of the known in one’s self, fear of the unknown in one’s self. That halted her again, for she knew now that it was something within herself that threatened her.  But it was his nearness to her that evoked it.

For she saw, now that her real inclination was to be with him, that she had liked him from the first, had found him agreeable—­pleasant past belief—­and that, although there seemed to be no reason for her liking, no excuse, nothing to explain her half-fearful pleasure in his presence, and her desire for it, she did desire it.  And for the first time since her widowhood she felt that she had been living her life out along lines that lay closer to solitude than to the happy freedom of which she had reluctantly dreamed locked in the manacles of a loveless marriage.