“Mr. Dalton’s car is a—­silver ship——­”

“Oh, does he call it that?” grimly.

“No——­”

“Was it your own—­poetic—­idea?”

“Yes.”

“And you called Little Sister a duck,” he groaned.  “And when my little duck swims in the wake of his silver ship, and he laughs, do you laugh, too?”

There was a dead silence.  Then she said, “Oh, Randy——­”

He made his apology like a gentleman.  “That was hateful of me, Becky.  I’m sorry——­”

“You know I wouldn’t laugh, Randy, and neither would he.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Dalton.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Laugh.”

He hated her defense of young Apollo—­but he couldn’t let the subject alone.

“You never have any time for me.”

“Randy, are you going to scold me for the rest of our ride?”

“Am I scolding?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll stop it and say nice things to you or you won’t want to come again.”

Yet after that when he saw her in Dalton’s car, her words would return to him, and gradually he began to think of her as sailing in a silver ship farther and farther away in a future where he could not follow.

Little Sister was a great comfort in those days.  She gave him occupation and she gave him an income.  He was never to forget his first sale.  He had not found it easy to cry his wares.  The Paines of King’s Crest had never asked favors of the country-folk, or if they had, they had paid generously for what they had received.  To go now among them saying, “I have something to sell,” carried a sting.  There had been nothing practical in Randy’s education.  He had no equipment with which to meet the sordid questions of bargain and sale.

He had thought of this as he rode over the hills that morning to the house of a young farmer who had been suggested by the genial gentleman as a good prospect.  He turned over in his mind the best method of approach.  It was a queer thing, he pondered, to visualize himself as a salesman.  He wondered how many of the other fellows who had come back looked at it as he did.  They had dreamed such dreams of valor, their eyes had seen visions.  To Randy when he had enlisted had come a singing sense that the days of chivalry were not dead.  He had gone through the war with a laugh on his lips, but with a sense of the sacredness of the crusade in his heart.  He had returned—­still dreaming—­to sell snub-nosed cars to the countryside!

Why, just a year ago——!  He remembered a black night of storm, when, hooded like a falcon—­he had ridden without a light on his motorcycle, carrying dispatches from the Argonne, and even as he had ridden, he had felt that high sense of heroic endeavor.  On the success of his mission depended other lives, the saving of nations—­victory——!

And now he, with a million others, was faced by the problem of the day’s work.  He wondered how the others looked at it—­those gallant young knights in khaki who had followed the gleam.  Were they, too, grasping at any job that would buy them bread and butter, pay their bills, keep them from living on the bounty of others?