Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/238

 "And why not?"

"And did you get"

"Yes—I got shot."

Her eyes were big with wonder.

"Oh! please tell me about it. When did it happen? How did it happen?"

"It happened early in the war—I got well enough to go back again."

"You went back again after you had got shot?"

"Of course I did. Iwas not such a cripple that I could not serve. A lame leg," he added bitterly, "disables a man more in after life than it does in action. Men respect their captain none the less for being a little damaged."

"Oh! What did they do to thank you?"

He looked down upon the glowing young face rising up out of the garland of daisies, and he wished she would go home and not stay there looking like that. But he said in a matter-of-fact voice:

"They treated me very well—they made me a colonel before we got through."

"A colonel! How brave you must have been!"

And then, as she stood before him and met his eyes, into which a look had come which she did not quite understand, her self-consciousness came rushing back upon her, and she turned abruptly and awkwardly enough and left him.

She went down stairs and out into the long yellow sunlight, thinking new and solemn thoughts.

It was the first time that Hattie had ever been