“Tim doesn’t say anything disparaging to the people of our valley,” I protested.  “He says, ’in Black Log the girls don’t understand how to dress.  They deck themselves out in gaudy finery.  Now Edith wears the simplest things.  You never notice her gown.  You only see her figure and her face.’”

“Do I deck myself out in gaudy finery, Mark?” Mary’s appeal was direct and simple.

A shake of the head was my only answer.  I wanted to tell her that Tim was blind.  I wanted to tell her the boy was a fool; that Edith, the tall, thin, pale creature, was not to be compared to one woman in our valley; that I know who that woman was; that I loved her.  I would have told her this.  With a sudden impulse I leaned toward her.  As suddenly I fell back.  My crutches had clattered to the floor!

A battered veteran!  A pensioner!  A back-woods pedagogue!  That I was.  That I must be to the end.  My place was in the school-house.  My place was on the store bench, set away there with a lot of other broken antiquities.  That I should ask a woman to link her life with mine, was absurd.  A fair ship on a fair sea soon parts company with a derelict—­unless it tows it.  A score of times I had fought this out, and as often I had found but one course and had set myself to follow it, but there was that in Mary’s quiet eyes that shook my resolution.  There was an appeal there, and trust.

“I am glad, anyway, I am not so much above you, Mark,” she said, now laughing.

I gathered up my crutches and the letter.  I gathered up my wits again.

“There’s where I feel like Tim, indeed,” I said.

“I don’t think I should like this lofty Edith,” the girl exclaimed.  “What a pompous word it is—­Edith!  Tim is ambitious.  I suppose he rolls that name over and over in his mind.”

It seemed that Mary was unnecessarily sharp toward a young woman she had never seen and of whom she had as yet heard nothing but good.  While for myself I felt a certain resentment at Tim for his praise of this girl and the condescending references to my misfortune in never having seen her like, I had for him a certain keen sympathy and hope for his success.  I had a certain sympathy for Edith, too, for a man in love, if unrestrained in his praise, will make a plain, sensible, motherly girl look like a frivolous fool.  Perhaps in this case Edith was the victim.  I suggested this to Mary, and she laughed softly.

“Perhaps so,” she said.  “But I must admit it irritates me to see our Tim lose his head over a stranger.  I can only picture her as he does—­a superior being, who lives in Brooklyn, whose name is Edith, and who wears her hair in a small knot on top of her head.  Can you conceive her smile, Mark, if she saw us now—­if this fine Brooklyn girl with her city ways dropped down here in Black Log?”

“That’s all in Tim’s letter,” I cried.  “Listen.  ’She asked all about my home and you.  I told her of the place and of all the people, of Mary and Captain.  Last night I took over that picture of you in your uniform, and I won’t tell you all the nice things she said about you, and——­’”