"Oh, it's so funny to see such a big man so helpless. Really couldn't you find an argument of more weight? Besides you didn't know my profession the first time you saw me. I only wear these clothes when I am at work, just as a mechanic wears his overalls--and they are just as necessary, as you know. The first time you--you bumped into me, I dressed like other people and I had paid full fare, too. Nurses don't get clergy credentials from the railroad." With this she sprang to her feet. "Look how long the shadows are! I must go right back to my patient this minute." As she spoke she was all at once painfully conscious again that this man was a stranger. What must he think of her? How could she explain that it was not her habit to talk thus freely to men whom she did not know? She wished that he would tell her his name at least. Slowly--silently they walked together across the weed-grown yard. As they passed through the gap in the tumble-down fence, Dan turned to look back. It seemed to him ages since he had entered the yard. "What's the matter, have you lost something?" she asked. "No--that is--I--perhaps I have. But never mind, it is of no great importance, and anyway I could not find it. I think I will say good-bye now," he added. "I'm not going to town just yet." Again she wondered at his face, it was so troubled. He watched her down the street until her blue dress, with its white trimming became a blur in the shadows. Then he struck out once more for the open country. CHAPTER XI. REFLECTIONS "And gradually, out of the material of his school experience, he built again the old bulwark, behind which he could laugh at his confusion of the hour before." Since that first chance meeting at the depot when he had looked into the nurse's eyes and heard her voice only for a moment, Dan had not been able to put the young woman wholly out of his mind. The incident on the street when she had gone to Denny, and the scene that followed in Denny's home had strengthened the first impression, while the meeting at the old Academy yard had stirred depths in his nature never touched before. The very things she had said to him were so evidently born out of a nature great in its passion for truth and in its capacity for feeling that, even though her words were biting and stung, he could not but rejoice in the beauty and strength of the spirit they revealed. The usual trite criticisms of the church Dan had heard, and had already learned to think somewhat lightly of the kind of people who commonly make them. But this young woman--so wholesome, so good to look at in her sweet seriousness, so strong in her womanliness and withal so useful in what she called her ministry--this woman was--well, she was different.