soft brown and sweeps back from a low white forehead. She has tried to
make it straight and simple, as every woman should, but the angels seem
to have curled it here and mussed it there, so that all her care cannot
hide its wanton waves. Her face is full of life and health, so open,
so candid, that there you read her heart, and you know that it is as
good as she is fair.

She stood before me in a sombre gown, almost ugly in its gray color and
severe lines, but to me she was a quaint figure such as might have
stepped out of the old world and the old time when men lived with a
vengeance, and godliness and ugliness went arm in arm, for Satan had
preempted the beautiful. Against her a homely garb failed. She was
beautiful in spite of her clothes and not because of them. But this is
generally true with women. This one, instead of sharing our admiration
with her gown, claimed it all for herself. Her face had no rival.

I did not turn away. I could not. The gray eyes, once flashing with
the light of kindly humor, now softened with sympathy, now glowed with
pity. Pity! The thought of it stirred me with anger. The justice of
it made me rage. She saw in the chair a thin, broken figure, a drawn
brown face, a wreck of a man. Yesterday--a soldier. To-day--a hero.
To-morrow--a crippled veteran, and after that a pensioner drifting fast
into a garrulous dotage. She, too, was looking into the future. She
knew what I had lost. She saw what I dreaded. Her eyes told me that.
She did not know what I had gained, for she came of a silly people
whose blood quickened only to the swing of a German hymn and who were
stirred more by the groans of a penitent sinner than the martial call
of the bugle.

So it came that I struggled to my crutches and broke rudely in on Perry