gripped Gale’s hand, and together they moved forward and to the left of the door until they came to a low bench. There they seated themselves.

Leaning far forward, Isabelle sat as a child sits before the opening of some entrancing drama.

Gale leaned back. With the shadows, serious problems had again entered her mind. “I am a soldier,” she thought fiercely. “Then I must fight!”

At that moment she seemed to see her toothless ninety-year-old great grandfather, and to hear him tell his tales of the Civil War. Weird and entrancing those tales had been. There was one,—a battle fought in a great forest. He had been wounded and lay all day behind a half-rotten log while the enemy’s bullets striking the log had knocked dirt in his face.

“Then at night,” he would go on, “A huge black man, lookin’ like a dark angel or a devil, found me and carried me away to a corncrib all full of good soft corn husks.

“My wound hurt something awful,” he would continue. “But I was dog tired. We’d fought for three days and three nights, so I fell asleep in that good soft bed, and never woke up until my own captain called my name. We had won the battle, and I had been found again.”

There had been more to the old man’s story, much more. He had told it over and over, but each time Gale’s soul was fired anew, and she would whisper:

“Oh! That’s wonderful! When I grow up I’m going to be a soldier.”

And always the old man had laughed his cackling laugh and exclaimed:

“Oh, no you won’t! Because then you’ll be a lady and ladies don’t go to war—just only men.”

“But women do go to war,” she assured herself as she sat there in the temple. “And I’m a soldier right now.”

On coming out of her day dream she was a little startled to find that Isabelle was no longer at her side.

“She’s poking around to see what she can discover,” she assured herself. That, she knew, was like Isabelle. As for herself, she had always been a little timid in strange places of religious worship. It was so easy to commit some prodigious blunder and to bring the wrath of gods down upon you.

So she sat on in the waning light. As her eyes 

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