A tall young man, a bit paler-faced perhaps than a normal young fellow should be, but otherwise a fine-looking specimen of manhood, sauntered slowly around the corner of the bank, and came to a stop on the curb just abreast the fore end of Thompson’s motor.  He took out a cigarette and lighted it with slow, deliberate motions.  And as he stood there, gazing with a detached impersonal air at the front of the Summit roadster, there approached him a recruiting sergeant.

“How about joining up this morning?” he inquired briskly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” the young man responded casually.  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Every man should be thinking about it,” the sergeant declared.  “The army needs men.  Now a well-set-up young fellow like you would get on capitally at soldiering.  It’s a great life.  When we get the Germans whipped every man will be proud to say he had a hand in it.  If a man struck you you wouldn’t stand back and let some other fellow do your fighting for you, now would you?  More than that, between you and me, it won’t be long before an able-bodied man can’t walk these streets in civvies, without the girls hooting him.  It’s a man’s duty to get into this war.  Better walk along with me to headquarters and sign on.”

The young man gazed across the street with the same immobility of expression.

“What’s the inducement?” he asked presently.

The sergeant, taking his cue from this, launched forth upon a glowing description of army life, the pay, the glory, the manifold advantages that would certainly accrue.  He painted a rosy picture, a gallant picture.  One gathered from his talk that a private in khaki was greater than a captain of industry in civilian clothes.  He dwelt upon the brotherhood, the democracy of arms.  He spilled forth a lot of the buncombe that is swallowed by those who do not know from bitter experience that war, at best, is a ghastly job in its modern phases, a thing that the common man may be constrained to undertake if need arises, but which brings him little pleasure and less glory—­beyond the consciousness that he has played his part as a man should.

The young man heard the recruiting sergeant to an end.  And when that worthy had finished he found fixed steadily upon him a pair of coldly speculative gray-green eyes.

“How long have you been in the army?” he asked.

“About eighteen months,” the sergeant stated.

“Have you been over there?”

“No,” the sergeant admitted.  “I expect to go soon, but for the present I’m detailed to recruiting.”

The young man had a flower in the lapel of his coat.  He removed it, the flower, and thrust the lapel in the sergeant’s face.  The flower had concealed a bronze button.