ave been amazed, enraged through wounded vanity, if it had been
possible for him to see himself from Dora's point of view: a subject for
reformation; a test for many trite theories; an erring human to be
reclaimed by a woman's benign influence. Naturally, these thoughts had not
suggested themselves to Smith.

Ralston looked forward eagerly to the evening meal, since it was almost
the only time at which he could exchange a word with Dora. Breakfast was a
hurried affair, while both she and Susie were absent from the midday
dinner. The shy, fluttering glances which he occasionally surprised from
her, the look of mutual appreciation which sometimes passed between them
at a quaint bit of philosophy or naive remark, started his pulses dancing
and set the whole world singing a wordless song of joy.

Somehow, eating seemed a vulgar function in the Schoolmarm's presence,
and he wished with all his heart that the abominable grammar lessons which
filled her evenings might some time end; in which case he would be able to
converse with her when not engaged in rushing bread and meat to and fro.

His most carefully laid plans to obtain a few minutes alone with her were
invariably thwarted by Smith. And from the heights to which he had been
transported by some more than passing friendly glance at the table, he was
dragged each evening to the depths by the sight of Dora and Smith with
their heads together over that accursed grammar.

He commenced to feel a distaste for his bunk-house associates, and took
to wandering out of doors, pausing most frequently in his meanderings
just outside the circle of light thrown through the window by the
dining-room lamp. Dora's guilelessness in believing that Smith's interest
in his lessons was due to a desire for knowledge did not make the
tableau less tantalizing to Ralston, but it would have been against every
tenet in his code to suggest to Dora that Smith was not the misguided
diamond-in-the-rough which she believed him.

Smith, on the contrary, had no such scruples. He lost no opportunity to
sneer at Ralston. When he discovered Dora wearing one of the first flowers
of spring, which Ralston had brought her, Smith said darkly:

"That fresh guy is a dead ringer for a feller that quit his wife and five
kids in Livingston and run off with a biscuit-shooter."

Dora laughed aloud. The clean-cut and youthful Ralston deserting a wife
and five children for a "biscuit-shooter" was not a convincing pict