She left him walking up and down the veranda, while she ran for the ice-pitcher and a goblet, and when she came back he was still walking up and down, shouting the story he had told her to her father and mother, who had come out more sketchily dressed than they commonly were by day.  He drank goblet after goblet of the ice-water without noticing who was giving it, and kept on talking, and laughing through his talk wildly.  “It’s astonishing,” he said, “how well the worse reason looks when you try to make it appear the better.  Why, I believe I was the first convert to the war in that crowd to-night!  I never thought I should like to kill a man; but now I shouldn’t care; and the smokeless powder lets you see the man drop that you kill.  It’s all for the country!  What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!”

Editha had a great, vital thought, an inspiration.  She set down the ice-pitcher on the veranda floor, and ran up-stairs and got the letter she had written him.  When at last he noisily bade her father and mother, “Well, goodnight.  I forgot I woke you up; I sha’n’t want any sleep myself,” she followed him down the avenue to the gate.  There, after the whirling words that seemed to fly away from her thoughts and refuse to serve them, she made a last effort to solemnize the moment that seemed so crazy, and pressed the letter she had written upon him.

“What’s this?” he said.  “Want me to mail it?”

“No, no.  It’s for you.  I wrote it after you went this morning.  Keep it—­keep it—­and read it sometime—­” She thought, and then her inspiration came:  “Read it if ever you doubt what you’ve done, or fear that I regret your having done it.  Read it after you’ve started.”

They strained each other in embraces that seemed as ineffective as their words, and he kissed her face with quick, hot breaths that were so unlike him, that made her feel as if she had lost her old lover and found a stranger in his place.  The stranger said:  “What a gorgeous flower you are, with your red hair, and your blue eyes that look black now, and your face with the color painted out by the white moonshine!  Let me hold you under the chin, to see whether I love blood, you tiger-lily!” Then he laughed Gearson’s laugh, and released her, scared and giddy.  Within her wilfulness she had been frightened by a sense of subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she had never been before.

She ran all the way back to the house, and mounted the steps panting.  Her mother and father were talking of the great affair.  Her mother said:  “Wa’n’t Mr. Gearson in rather of an excited state of mind?  Didn’t you think he acted curious?”

“Well, not for a man who’d just been elected captain and had set ’em up for the whole of Company A,” her father chuckled back.

“What in the world do you mean, Mr. Balcom?  Oh!  There’s Editha!” She offered to follow the girl indoors.