“I don’t think you ought to take them so much for granted—­the men, I mean,” she cautioned.  “I can’t help feeling afraid that some of the joking is not quite good-natured.”

“I fancy very little of it is what you would call good-natured,” he rejoined evenly.  “Very much of it is thinly disguised contempt.”

“For your authority?”

“For me, personally, first; and for my authority as a close second.”

“Then you are anticipating trouble when the laugh is over?”

He shook his head.  “I’m hoping No, as I said a moment ago, but I’m expecting Yes.”

“And you are not afraid?”

It would have been worth a great deal to him if he could have looked fearlessly into the clear gray eyes of questioning, giving her a brave man’s denial.  But instead, his gaze went beyond her and he said:  “You surely wouldn’t expect me to confess it if I were afraid, would you?  Don’t you despise a coward, Miss Dawson?”

The sun was sinking behind the Timanyonis, and the soft glow of the western sky suffused her face, illuminating it with rare radiance.  It was not, in the last analysis, a beautiful face, he told himself, comparing it with another whose outlines were bitten deeply and beyond all hope of erasure into the memory page.  Yet the face warming softly in the sunset glow was sweet and winsome, attractive in the best sense of the overworked word.  At the moment Lidgerwood rather envied Benson—­or Gridley, whichever one of the two it was for whom Miss Dawson cared the most.

“There are so many different kinds of cowards,” she said, after the reflective interval.

“But they are all equally despicable?” he suggested.

“The real ones are, perhaps.  But our definitions are often careless.  My grandfather, who was a captain of volunteers in the Civil War, used to say that real cowardice is either a psychological condition or a soul disease, and that what we call the physical symptoms of it are often misleading.”

“For example?” said Lidgerwood.

“Grandfather used to be fond of contrasting the camp-fire bully and braggart, as one extreme, with the soldier who was frankly afraid of getting killed, as the other.  It was his theory that the man who dodged the first few bullets in a battle was quite likely to turn out to be the real hero.”

Lidgerwood could not resist the temptation to probe the old wound.

“Suppose, under some sudden stress, some totally unexpected trial, a man who was very much afraid of being afraid found himself morally and physically unable to do the courageous thing.  Wouldn’t he be, to all intents and purposes, a real coward?”

She took time to think.

“No,” she said finally, “I wouldn’t say that.  I should wait until I had seen the same man tried under conditions that would give him time, to think first and to act afterward.”

“Would you really do that?” he asked doubtfully.