"When she will," replied the old man, softly hammering. "Sometimes a week goes by and I see nothing of her; and then she'll slip in and sit beside me for an hour, and be gone again--so lightly that I think afterward it's a dream, and that she has not been here at all. It's all dreams; nothing is real."
"Oh, I'm afraid some things are very real," said the captain gravely.
"No." He brought the hammer down sharply to emphasize the word. "If they were real we could not bear them; we should go mad. It's because they are dreams that we can laugh a little sometimes and say that it doesn't matter, and pray for the hour when we shall wake. Nothing's real, nothing's real; we should be glad of that." He fell to hammering again, in the same hurried fashion as when they had first seen him. Indeed, nothing would rouse him again; even when the captain asked that he might take the girl with him, and she slipped down from the bench and walked with Comethup to the door, the shoemaker merely raised his eyes for a moment to look at her, and went on again with his work. They heard the noise of the hammering long after they had passed through the doorway and through the little street; it only seemed to die away when they came out through the archway into the busier parts of the town.
The captain had a delightful new pupil that day. The three went out to the marshes beyond the town, and there, at Comethup's modest suggestion, the captain assisted in the building of the forts and instructed 'Linda in the first principles of military tactics. She proved an apt and eager pupil, overleaping obstacles which appeared to present themselves to the slower mind of the captain, and showing a delightful sense of the fine art of strategy and a quickness of resource in a difficult situation, which elicited that gentleman's warm approval. In the most natural and fearless fashion she walked back with them to the captain's cottage and partook of the captain's simple dinner, unconsciously and quickly taking a position in the small household which no one had dared to occupy before. She showed unbounded delight at the salute given by Homer, the captain's man, and actually called him back into the room again and insisted on his repeating the performance in order that she might see exactly how it was done, making the blushing man do it very slowly indeed, that she might take in every turn and twist of his arm.