ffer, and what had she done to deserve it?

If Jack suspected any of these heartaches and misgivings, no one would
have surmised it. He came and went as usual, passing an hour in the
morning and an hour at night with his Chief, until he had entirely
recovered his strength--bringing with him the records of the work; the
number of feet drilled in a day; cost of maintenance; cubic contents of
dump; extent and slope and angles of "fill"--all the matters which since
his promotion (Jack now had Bolton's place) came under his immediate
supervision. Nor had any word passed between himself and Ruth, other
than the merest commonplace. He was cheery, buoyant, always ready to
help,--always at her service if she took the train for New York or
stayed after dark at a neighbor's house, when he would insist on
bringing her home, no matter how late he had been up the night before.

If the truth were known, he neither suspected nor could he be made to
believe that Ruth had any troubles. The facts were that he had given her
all his heart and had been ready to lay himself at her feet, that being
the accepted term in his mental vocabulary--and she would have none of
him. She had let him understand so--rebuffed him--not once, but every
time he had tried to broach the subject of his devotion;--once in the
Geneseo arbor, and again on that morning when he had really crawled to
her side because he could no longer live without seeing her. The manly
thing to do now was to accept the situation: to do his work; look after
his employer's interests, read, study, run over whenever he could to see
Peter--and these were never-to-be-forgotten oases in the desert of his
despair--and above all never to forget that he owed a duty to Miss Ruth
in which no personal wish of his own could ever find a place. She was
alone and without an escort except her father, who was often so absorbed
in his work, or so tired at night, as to be of little help to her.
Moreover, his Chief had, in a way, added his daughter's care to his
other duties. "Can't you take Ruth to-night--" or "I wish you'd meet
her at the ferry," or "if you are going to that dinner in New York, at
so-and-so's, would you mind calling for her--" etc., etc. Don't start,
dear reader. These two came of a breed where the night key and the
daughter go together and where a chaperon would be as useless as a
policeman locked inside a bank vault.

And so the boy struggled on, growing in bodily strength and mental