Albert's response to McComas at the horse-show had not been noticeably prompt or adroit, but he cast about manfully for words and presently was able to voice his appreciation of Althea's feat (as it was regarded) and to congratulate her upon it. Johnny McComas was not at all displeased. Albert had not been light-handed and graceful, but he developed (under this sudden stress) a sturdy, downright mode of speech which showed sincerity if not dexterity. The square-standing, straight-speaking farm-lad—straight-speaking, if none too ready—was sounding an atavistic note caught from his great-grandfather back in York State.

"Stuff in him!" commented Johnny. "It's a wonder, but there is. Must be his mother."

Albert made no particular impression, however, on Althea herself. A dozen other young fellows had been more demonstrative and more fluent. He simply slid over the surface of her mind and fell away again. She had known him—intermittently—for years as a somewhat inexpressive boy; now, as a potential gallant, he was negligible, as compared with others. But Albert, speaking in a sense either specific or general, did not mean to remain negligible.

He soon forgot most of the details of the day at the horse-show. He had hardly a greater affinity for sport than his father had had. He began his sophomore year with no interest in athletics. The compulsory gymnasium-work bored him. He made no single team—put forth not the least effort to make one. The football crowd, the baseball crowd, even the tennis crowd, gave him up and left him alone.

Yet his bodily energies and his mental ambitions were waxing daily; his passions too. There must be an outlet for all this vigor—business, or matrimony, or war. In one short twelvemonth he compassed all three.

By the end of Albert's second year, the day had come when a self-respecting young man of fortune and position found it hard if he must confess: "I have taken all yet given nothing." The Great War waged more furiously than ever, and came more close. The country had first said, "You may," and, later, "You must." Albert did not wait for the "must." He closed his year a month or so in advance—as he had done once before—and enrolled in a college-unit for service abroad.

Raymond gave his consent—a matter of form, a futility. In fact, Albert enrolled first and asked (or advised) later. His mother, of a mixed mind, would have interposed an objection. McComas hushed her down. "Let him go. He has the makings of a man. Don't cut off his best chance."

McComas had a right to speak. Tom McComas was going too, and going with his father's warm approval. If he could leave a young wife and a three-year-old boy, need a young bachelor student be held back?

Albert came West for a good-bye. His father held his hand and gave him a long scrutiny—part of the time with eyes wide open, part of the time with eyes closed to a fine, inquiring, studious line. But he never saw what there was to see. In his own body there was not one drop of martial blood; in his being not an iota of the bellicose spirit. Why men fight, even why boys fight—all this had been a mystery which he must take on faith, with little help from the fisticuffs and brawls of school-days, or even from the gigantic, agonizing closing-in of whole peoples, now under way.

Yet Albert understood, and meant to take his share.

Who, indeed, as Raymond had once asked petulantly, could know what a boy was going to be?

When Althea saw Albert in khaki, she saw him: this time no indifference, no fusing him with the crowd, no letting him fade away unnoticed. If he had shaken before her on her hurdle-taker, she now shook before him in his brown regimentals. It was as if, in an instant, he had bolted from their familiar—their sometimes over-familiar—atmosphere. He confused, he perturbed her: he was so like, yet so different; so close, yet so remote. Was he a relative, of sorts—a relative in some loose sense; or was he a strange young hero, with his face set toward yet stranger scenes...?

"Come," said her father, who was close by, between the horse-block and the syringa-bushes, "Albert isn't the only soldier on the battle-field. Look at Tom, here!"

Althea turned her eyes dutifully toward her stalwart brother, who humorously put up his stiffened fingers to the stiff brim of his hat; and then she looked back at Albert.