Armitage had been the subject of so much jesting between Dick and herself
that it seemed strange to be talking to him. His face brightened
pleasantly when he spoke; his eyes were grayer than she had mockingly
described them for her brother's benefit the day before. His manner was
gravely courteous, and she did not at all believe that he had followed
her about.

Her ideals of men were colored by the American prejudice in favor of
those who aim high and venture much. In her childhood she had read Malory
and Froissart with a boy's delight. She possessed, too, that poetic sense
of the charm of "the spirit of place" that is the natural accompaniment
of the imaginative temperament. The cry of bugles sometimes brought tears
to her eyes; her breath came quickly when she sat--as she often did--in
the Fort Myer drill hall at Washington and watched the alert cavalrymen
dashing toward the spectators' gallery in the mimic charge. The work that
brave men do she admired above anything else in the world. As a child in
Washington she had looked wonderingly upon the statues of heroes and the
frequent military pageants of the capital; and she had wept at the solemn
pomp of military funerals. Once on a battleship she had thrilled at the
salutes of a mighty fleet in the Hudson below the tomb of Grant; and soon
thereafter had felt awe possess her as she gazed upon the white marble
effigy of Lee in the chapel at Lexington; for the contemplation of heroes
was dear to her, and she was proud to believe that her father, a veteran
of the Civil War, and her soldier brother were a tie between herself and
the old heroic times.

Armitage was aware that a jeweler's shop was hardly the place for
extended conversation with a young woman whom he scarcely knew, but he
lingered in the joy of hearing this American girl's voice, and what she