“But will you?” she asked.

How I liked the way she put it!  It was flattering—­subtly so.  She seemed to imply that I was a modest soldier, and if there is a way to flatter a man it is to call him modest.  Modesty is one of the best of policies.  To call a man honest is no more than to call him healthy or handsome.  These are attributes of nearly everyone at some time in his life.  But to do a great deed or a good deed, and to rejoice that it has been done and the world is better for it, and not because you did it and the world knows it, that is different.  So often our modesty consists in using as much effort to walk with hanging head and sloping shoulders as we should need for a majestic strut.

She called me modest.  Yet there I sat in my old khaki uniform.  It was ragged and dirty, and I was proud of it.  It was a bit thin for a chilly autumn day, but in spite of Tim’s expostulation I had worn it, refusing his offers of a warmer garb.  I was clinging to my glory.  While I had on that old uniform, I was a soldier.  When I laid it aside, I should become as Aaron Kallaberger and Arnold Arker.  A year hence people would ask me if I had been a railroad man in my time.

She called me modest.  That very morning Tim told me she was coming.  She had made some jellies, so she said, for the soldier of the valley.  They were her offering to the valley’s idol.  She thought the idol would consume them, for bachelor cooking was never intended for bachelor invalids.  Tim had mentioned this casually.  I suspected that he believed that the visit to me was simply a pretence and that she knew he was to be working in the field by the house.  But I took no chances.  In the seclusion of my room I brushed every speck off the uniform and made sure that every inch of it fitted snugly and without an unnecessary wrinkle.  Then when my hair had been parted and smoothed down, I crowned myself with my campaign hat at the dashingest possible tilt.  Thus arrayed I fixed myself on the porch, to be smoking my pipe in a careless, indifferent way when she came.  An egotist, you say—­a vain man.  No—­just a man.  For who when She comes would not look his best?  We prate a lot about the fair sex and its sweet vanities.  Yet it takes us less time to do our hair simply because it is shorter.

When Mary comes!  The gate latch clicked and I whistled the sprightliest air I knew.  Down in the field Tim appeared from the maze of corn-stalks and looked my way beneath a shading hand.  There were foot-falls on the porch.  Had they been light I should have kept on whistling in that careless way; but now I looked up, startled.  Before me stood not Mary, but Josiah Nummler.

[Illustration:  Josia Nummler.]

It was kind of Josiah to come, for he is an old man and lives a full mile above the village, half way up the ridge-side.  He is very fat, too, from much meditation, and to aid his thin legs in moving his bulky body he carries a very long stick, which he uses like a paddle to propel him; so when you see him in the distance he seems to be standing in a canoe, sweeping it along.  Really he is only navigating the road.  He had a clothes-prop with him that day, and pausing at the end of the porch, he leaned on it and gasped.  I ought to have been pleased to see Josiah.