At the conclusion of this philosophic speech my visitor adjusted his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, brought himself to rest with a click of his heels and smiled his defiance.

“But I congratulate you truly, heartily,” he added.

“Thank you, Perry,” I answered.  “In spite of your trifling way of regarding women, I hope that some day you may find another as good as Mary Warden.”

“The same to you, Mark,” said he.

“The same to me?” I cried, with a touch of resentment.

“Of course,” he replied.  “I says to myself to-night, ’I hope Mark is as fortunate,’ I says, when I saw them two a——­”

“What two?” I exclaimed, lifting myself half out of my chair in my eagerness.

“Why, Tim and her,” Perry answered.  “Ain’t you heard it yet, Mark?  Am I the first to know?”

“Tim and her,” I cried.  “Tim and Mary?”

“Yes,” said Perry.

He saw now that he was imparting strange news to me.  In my sudden agitation he divined that that news had struck hard home, and that I was not blessed with his own philosophic nature.  The smile left his face.  He stepped to me, as I sat there in the chair staring vacantly into the fire, and laid a hand on my shoulder.

“I thought of course you knowd it,” he said gently.  “I thought of course you knowd all about it, and when I seen them up there to-night, her a-holdin’ to him so lovin’, says I to myself, ’How pleased Mark will be—­he thinks so much of Tim and Mary.’”

Tim’s minute!  I knew now why it was so long.  I should have known it long ago.  I feared to ask Perry what he had seen.  I divined it.  I had debated with myself too much the strangeness of Mary’s promise, and often in the last few days there had come over me a vague fear that I was treading in the clouds.  She had told me again and again that she cared for me more than for anyone else in the world.  But that night when I had asked her if she loved me, she had turned my collar up.  I believed that when she spoke then it was what she thought the truth.  She had pledged herself to me and I had not demanded more.  I had been selfish enough to ask that she link herself to my narrow life, and she had looked at me clear in the eye.  “You are strong, Mark, and good, and true,” she had said, “and in all the world there is none I trust more.  I’ll love you, too.  I promise.”

On that promise I had built all my hopes and happiness, and it had failed me.  It was not strange.  I had been a fool, a silly dreamer, and now I had found it out.  A soldier?  Paugh!  Away back somewhere in the past, I had gone mad at a bugle-call.  A hero?  For a day.  For a day I had puffed myself up with pride at my deeds.  And now those deeds were forgotten.  I was a veteran, a crippled pensioner, an humble pedagogue, a petty farmer.  This was the lot I had asked her to share.  She had made her promise, and that promise made and broken was more than I deserved.  From a heaven she had smiled down on me, and I had climbed to the clouds, reaching out for her.  Then her face was turned from me, and down I had come, clattering to common earth, cursing because I had hurt myself.