verybody stopped to speak to the Doctor. He had been but a few
months in the place; but the old church-goers had found him out as
a passionate, free-and-easy, honorable fellow, full of joke and
anecdote,--shrewd, too. They "fellowshipped" with him heartily, and were
glad when he got the post of surgeon with their sons. If there were
anything more astringent below this, any more real self in the man, held
back, belonging to a world outside of theirs, they did not see it. They
knew him better, they thought, than they did Daniel McKinstry, who had
grown up among them, just as mild and silent when he was a tow-haired
boy as now, a man of forty-five. He touched his hat to them now, and
went on, while Blecker leaned on the carriage-doors, his brown face
aglow with fun, his uneasy fingers drumming boyishly on the panel. Not
knowing that through the changeful face, and fierce, pitiful eyes of the
boy, the man Paul Blecker looked coolly out, testing, labelling
them. The boy in him, that they saw, Nature had made; but years of a
hand-to-hand fight with starvation came after, crime, and society, whose
work is later than Nature's, and sometimes better done.

"Fine girl!" said the Doctor, touching his hat to Miss Mallard, as she
cantered past. "Got a head of her own, too. Made a deused good speech,
when she presented the flag to-day."

Miss Mallard overheard him, as he intended she should, and blushed a
visible acknowledgment. All of her character was visible, well-developed
as her body: her timidity showed itself in the unceasing dropping of her
eyelid; her arch simplicity in the pouting lips; a coy reserve--well,
that everywhere, to the very rosette on her retreating slipper; and her
patriotism was quite palpable in the color of her Balmoral. She rode
Squire Mallard's gray.

"And very well they turn out," sneered Blecker.

"She is a woman," said the Captain, blushing,--differently from the
lady, however.

"And if she is?" turning suddenly. "She has the nature of a Bowery
rough. Pah, McKinstry! Sexes stand alike with me. If a woman's flesh is
weaker-grained a bit, what of that? Whoever would earn esteem must work
for it."

The Captain said nothing, stammered a little, then, hoisting his foot on
a stump, tied his shoe nervously.

Blecker smiled, a queer, sorrowful smile, as if, oddly enough, he felt
sorry for himself.

"I'd like to think of women as you do, Mac," he said. "You never knew
many?"

"Only two, until now,--my