Dora knew it was “something else.”  Her memory went back to her first recollection of him in school:  from that time on he had been just an ordinary, everyday boy, floundering somehow through his lessons in school and through his sweethearting with Milla, as the millions of other boys floundered along with their own lessons and their own Millas.  She saw him swinging his books and romping homeward from the schoolhouse, or going whistling by her father’s front yard, rattling a stick on the fence as he went, care-free and masterful, but shy as a deer if strangers looked at him, and always “not much of a talker.”

She had always felt so superior to him, she shuddered as she thought of it.  His quiet had been so much better than her talk.  His intelligence was proven now, when it came to the great test, to be of a stronger sort than hers.  He was wise and good and gentle—­and a fighting man!  “We know what they’ve done to this country and what they mean to do to ours.  So we’re going to attend to them.”  She read this over, and she knew that Ramsey, wise and gentle and good, would fight like an unchained devil, and that he and his comrades would indeed and indeed do what they “came for.”

“It wasn’t you,” he said.  She nodded gently, agreeing, and knew what it was that sent him.  Yet Ramsey had his own secret there, and did not tell it.  Sometimes there rose, faint in his memory, a whimsical picture, yet one that had always meant much to him.  He would see an old man sitting with a little boy upon a rustic bench under a walnut tree to watch the “Decoration Day Parade” go by—­and Ramsey would see a shoot of sunshine that had somehow got through the walnut tree and made a bedazzlement of glinting fine lines over a spot about the size of a saucer, upon the old man’s thick white hair.  And in Ramsey’s memory, the little boy, sitting beside the veteran, would half close his eyes, drowsily, playing that this sunshine spot was a white bird’s-nest, until he had a momentary dream of a glittering little bird that dwelt there and wore a blue soldier cap on its head.  And Ramsey would bring out of his memory thoughts that the old man had got into the child’s head that day.  “We knew that armies fighting for the Freedom of Man had to win, in the long run....  We were on the side of God’s Plan....  Long ago we began to see hints of His Plan....  Man has to win his freedom from himself—­men in the light have to fight against men in the dark....  That light is the answer....  We had the light that made us never doubt.”

A long while Dora sat with the letter in her hand before she answered it and took it upon her heart to wear.  That was the place for it, since it was already within her heart, where he would find it when he came home again.  And she beheld the revelation sent to her.  This ordinary life of Ramsey’s was but the outward glinting of a high and splendid spirit, as high and splendid as earth can show.  And yet it was only the life of an everyday American boy.  The streets of the town were full, now, of boys like Ramsey.