ccident which
made all the circumstances most trying, but she had never heard the
details. She only knew that most of the girls in her set looked on him as
a nobody and would no more have companied with him than with their
father's chauffeur. After he grew older and began to go to college some
of the girls began to think he was good looking, and to say it was quite
commendable in him to try to get an education. Some even unearthed the
fact that his had been a fine old family in former days and that there
had been wealth and servants once. But the story died down as John
Cameron walked his quiet way apart, keeping to his old friends, and not
responding to the feeble advances of the girls. Ruth had been away at
school in these days and had seldom seen him. When she had there had
always been that lingering admiration for him from the old days. She had
told herself that of course he could not be worth much or people would
know him. He was probably ignorant and uncultured, and a closer
acquaintance would show him far from what her young ideas had pictured
her hero. But somehow that day at the station, the look in his face had
revealed fine feeling, and she was glad now to have her intuition
concerning him verified by his letter.

And what a letter it was! Why, no young man of her acquaintance could
have written with such poetic delicacy. That paragraph about the rose was
beautiful, and not a bit too presuming, either, in one who had been a
perfect stranger all these years. She liked his simple frankness and the
easy way he went back twelve years and began just where they left off.
There was none of the bold forwardness that might have been expected in
one who had not moved in cultured society. There was no unpleasant
assumption of familiarity which might have emphasized her fear that she
had overstepped the bounds of convention in writing to him in the first
place. On the contrary, her humiliation at his long delayed answer was
all forgotten now. He had understood her perfectly and accepted her
letter in exactly the way she had meant it without the least bit of
foolishness or unpleasantness. In short, he had written the sort of a
letter that the kind of man she had always thought--hoped--he was would
be likely to write, and it gave her a surprisingly pleasant feeling of
satisfaction. It was as if she had discovered a friend all of her own not
made for her by her family, nor one to whom she fell heir because of her
wealth and