“Much you know about it!” exclaimed the young soldier, with vast chagrin. “You don’t deserve to see anything. I brought my togs in a haversack, and put them on in your bower here, simply to oblige you; and you don’t think they are worth looking at!”
“I am looking with all my might; and yet I cannot see anything of a sword. I suppose they won’t allow you one yet. But surely you must have a sword in the end.”
“Alice, you are enough to wear one out. Could I carry my sword in a haversack? However, if you don’t think I look well, somebody else does—that is one comfort.”
“You do not mean, I hope,” replied Alice, missing his allusion carefully, “to go back to your ship without coming to see papa, dear Hilary?”
“That is exactly what I do mean; and that is why I have watched for you so. I have no intention of knocking under. And so he will find out in the end; and somebody else, I hope, as well. Everybody thinks I am such a fool, because I am easy-tempered. Let them wait a bit. They may be proud of that never-do-well, silly Hilary yet. In the last few months, I can assure you, I have been through things—however, I won’t talk about them. They never did understand me at home; and I suppose they never will. But it does not matter. Wait a bit.”
“Darling Hilary! don’t talk so. It makes me ready to cry to hear you. You will go into some battle, and throw your life away, to spite all of us.”
“No, no, I won’t. Though it would serve you right for considering me such a nincompoop. As if the best, and sweetest, and truest-hearted girl in the universe was below contempt, because her father happens to grow cabbages! What do we grow? Corn, and hay, and sting-nettles, and couch-grass. Or at least our tenants grow them for us, and so we get the money. Well, how are they finer than cabbages?”
“Come in and see father,” said Alice, straining her self-control to shun argument. “Do come, and see him before you go.”
“I will not,” he answered, amazing his sister by his new-born persistency. “He never has asked me; and I will not do it.”
No tears, no sobs, no coaxings moved him; his troubles had given him strength of will; and he went to the war without seeing his father.