e. She answered Dottie Wetherill's chatter with distraught
monosyllables and absent smiles, hoping that Dottie would feel it
necessary to go home soon after lunch.

But it presently became plain that Dottie had no intention of going home
soon; that she had come for a purpose and that she was plying all her
arts to accomplish it. Ruth presently roused from her reverie to realize
this and set herself to give Dottie as little satisfaction as possible
out of her task. It was evident that she had been sent to discover the
exact standing and relation in which Ruth held Lieutenant Harry
Wainwright. Ruth strongly suspected that Dottie's brother Bob had been
the instigator of the mission, and she had no intention of giving him the
information.

So Ruth's smiles came out and the inscrutable twinkle grew in her lovely
eyes. Dottie chattered on sentence after sentence, paragraph after
paragraph, theme after theme, always rounding up at the end with some
perfectly obvious leading question. Ruth answered in all apparent
innocence and sincerity, yet with an utterly different turn of the
conversation from what had been expected, and with an indifference that
was hopelessly baffling unless the young ambassador asked a point blank
question, which she hardly dared to do of Ruth Macdonald without more
encouragement. And so at last a long two hours dragged thus away, and
finally Dottie Wetherill at the end of her small string, and at a loss
for more themes on which to trot around again to the main idea,
reluctantly accepted her defeat and took herself away, leaving Ruth to
her long delayed letter.

VIII

Ruth sat looking into space with starry eyes and glowing cheeks after she
had read the letter. It seemed to her a wonderful letter, quite the most
wonderful she had ever received. Perhaps it was because it fitted so
perfectly with her ideal of the writer, who from her little girlhood had
always been a picture of what a hero must be. She used to dream big
things about him when she was a child. He had been the best baseball
player in school when he was ten, and the handsomest little rowdy in
town, as well as the boldest, bravest champion of the little girls.

As she grew older and met him occasionally she had always been glad that
he kept his old hero look though often appearing in rough garb. She had
known they were poor. There had been some story about a loss of money and
a long expensive sickness of the father's following an a