The soldier looked at her earnestly.  “Because of the persecution,” he said.  “My father he was in exile.  His family was suspect.  I come alone to America when I am but fifteen.”

“Well I guess you’re sorry enough now that you came,” Miss Mink said, “Now that you’ve got drafted.”

They had reached her gate by this time, but Bowinski paused before entering:  “Madame mistakes!” he said with dignity.  “I was not drafted.  The day America enter the war, that day I give up my job I have held for five years, and enlist.  America is my country, she take me in when I have nowhere to go.  It is my proud moment when I fight for her!”

Then it was that Miss Mink took her first real look at him, and if it was a longer look than she had ever before bestowed upon man, we must put it down to the fact that he was well worth looking at, with his tall square figure, and his serious dark face lit up at the present with a somewhat indignant enthusiasm.

Miss Mink pushed open the gate and led the way into her narrow yard.  She usually entered the house by way of the side door which opened into the dining room, which was also her bedroom by night, and her sewing room by day.  But this morning, after a moment’s hesitation, she turned a key in the rusty lock of the front door, and let a flood of sunshine dispel the gloom of the room.  The parlor had been furnished by Miss Mink’s parents some sixty years ago, and nothing had been changed.  A customer had once suggested that if the sofa was taken away from the window, and the table put in its place, the room would be lighter.  Miss Mink had regarded the proposition as preposterous.  One might as well have asked her to move her nose around to the back of her head, or to exchange the positions of her eyes and ears!

You have seen a drop of water caught in a crystal?  Well, that was what Miss Mink was like.  She moved in the tiniest possible groove with her home at one end and her church at the other.  Is it any wonder that when she beheld a strange young foreigner sitting stiffly on her parlor sofa, and realized that she must entertain him for at least an hour, that panic seized her?

“I better be seeing to dinner,” she said hastily.  “You can look at the album till I get things dished up.”

Private Bowinski, surnamed Alexis, sat with knees awkwardly hunched and obediently turned the leaves of the large album, politely scanning the placid countenances of departed Minks for several generations.

Miss Mink, moving about in the inner room, glanced in at him from time to time.  After the first glance she went to the small store room and got out a jar of sweet pickle, and after the second she produced a glass of crab apple jelly.  Serving a soldier guest who had voluntarily adopted her country, was after all not so distasteful, if only she did not have to talk to him.  But already the coming ordeal was casting its baleful shadow.