“What’s your line?” he asked her. “I take it you have one by your being here. Besides, I am sure you have. I am an old fighter. I can tell the young soldier. What’s your regiment?” “I’ve always been a coward,” he continued. “I fell in love with you the first day I met you on the stairs. But I dared not tell you.”!

It was only a little cross, hers, by comparison. She could see that. They seemed to be standing side by side. But then she was only a woman—little more than a girl. And her courage was so small. She thought He ought to know that. For her, it was quite a big cross. She wondered if He had been listening to all her arguments. There was really a good deal of sense in some of them. Perhaps He would understand. Not all His prayer had come down to us. He, too, had put up a fight for life. He, too, was young. For Him, also, life must have seemed but just beginning. Perhaps He, too, had felt that His duty still lay among the people—teaching, guiding, healing them. To Him, too, life must have been sweet with its noble work, its loving comradeship. Even from Him the words had to be wrung: “Thy will, not Mine, be done.” There were the others. The men and women not in the lime-light. The lone, scattered men and women who saw no flag but Pity’s ragged skirt; who heard no drum but the world’s low cry of pain; who fought with feeble hands against the wrong around them; who with aching heart and troubled eyes laboured to make kinder the little space about them. The great army of the nameless reformers uncheered, unparagraphed, unhonoured. The unknown sowers of the seed. Would the reapers of the harvest remember them?

“Oh, a little,” she answered. “He’s absolutely sincere; and he means business. He won’t stop at the bottom of the ladder now he’s once got his foot upon it.” “How did it all happen?” she persisted. “Was it very beautiful, in the beginning?” She wished she had not added that last. The words had slipped from her before she knew. He rearranged his wife’s feather and smoothed her tumbled hair. She looked up at him and smiled.