I were afraid, would you?
Don't you despise a coward, Miss Dawson?"

The sun was sinking behind the Timanyonis, and the soft glow of the
western sky suffused her face, illuminating it with rare radiance. It
was not, in the last analysis, a beautiful face, he told himself,
comparing it with another whose outlines were bitten deeply and beyond
all hope of erasure into the memory page. Yet the face warming softly in
the sunset glow was sweet and winsome, attractive in the best sense of
the overworked word. At the moment Lidgerwood rather envied Benson--or
Gridley, whichever one of the two it was for whom Miss Dawson cared the
most.

"There are so many different kinds of cowards," she said, after the
reflective interval.

"But they are all equally despicable?" he suggested.

"The real ones are, perhaps. But our definitions are often careless. My
grandfather, who was a captain of volunteers in the Civil War, used to
say that real cowardice is either a psychological condition or a soul
disease, and that what we call the physical symptoms of it are often
misleading."

"For example?" said Lidgerwood.

"Grandfather used to be fond of contrasting the camp-fire bully and
braggart, as one extreme, with the soldier who was frankly afraid of
getting killed, as the other. It was his theory that the man who dodged
the first few bullets in a battle was quite likely to turn out to be the
real hero."

Lidgerwood could not resist the temptation to probe the old wound.

"Suppose, under some sudden stress, some totally unexpected trial, a man
who was very much afraid of being afraid found himself morally and
physically unable to do the courageous thing. Wouldn't he be, to all
intents and purposes, a real coward?"

She took time to think.

"No," she said finally, "I wouldn't say that. I should wait until I had
seen the same man tried under conditions that would give him time, to
think first and to act afterward."

"Would you really do that?" he asked doubtfully.

"Yes, I should. A trial of the kind you describe isn't quite fair. Acute
presence of mind in an emergency is not a supreme test of anything
except of itself; least of all, perhaps, is it a test of courage--I mean
courage of that quality which endures to-day and faces without flinching
the threatening to-morrow."

"And you think the man who might be surprised into doing something very
disgraceful on the spur of the moment might still have that other kind
of courage,