“I thought it came out very well indeed,” remarked Miss Parmalee, “especially his uniform. You could quite see the eagles on the buttons. You must thank Mr. Shull for me.”
“I’ll speak to him in the morning about it,” said Marsena, with gloomy emphasis. He sighed, bit his lip, fixed an intent gaze upon the big dark bulk of the Parmalee house looming before them, and spoke again. “There’s something that I want to say to you, though, that won’t keep till morning.” A tiny movement of the hand on his arm was the only response. “I see now,” Marsena went on, “that I ain’t been making any real headway with you at all. I thought—well—I don’t know as I know just what I did think—but I guess now that it was a mistake.” Yes—there was a distinct flutter of the little gloved hand. It put a wild thought into Marsena’s head.
“Would you,” he began boldly—“I never spoke of it before—but would you—that is, if I was to enlist and go to the war—would that make any difference?—you know what I mean.”
She looked up at him with magnetic sweetness in her dusky, shadowed glance. “How can any ablebodied young patriot hesitate at such a time as this?” she made answer, and pressed his arm.
V
It was in this same May, not more than a week after the momentous episode of the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair, that Marsena Pulford went off to the war.
There was no ostentation about his departure. He had indeed been gone for a day or two before it became known in Octavius that his absence from town meant that he had enlisted down at Tecumseh. We learned that he had started as a common private, but everybody made sure that a man of his distinguished appearance and deportment would speedily get a commission. Everybody, too, had a theory of some sort as to the motives for this sudden and strange behavior of his. These theories agreed in linking Miss Parmalee with the affair, but there were hopeless divergencies as to the exact part she played in it. One party held that Marsena had been driven to seek death on the tented field by despair at having been given the “mitten.” Others insisted that he had not been given the “mitten” at all, but had gone because her well-known martial ardor made the sacrifice of her betrothed necessary to her peace of mind. A minority took the view which Homer Sage promulgated from his tilted-back chair on the stoop of the Excelsior Hotel.
“They ain’t nothin’ settled betwixt ’em,” this student of human nature declared. “She jest dared him to go, and he went. And if you only give her time, she’ll have the whole male unmarried population of Octavius, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, down there wallerin’ around in the Virginny swamps, feedin’ the muskeeters and makin’ a bid for glory.”