very certain that there is nothing
quite definite as yet. Indeed, I'm not quite sure that Laura
really knows her own mind as yet."

Soon after that, Miss Meade requested to be conducted back into
the ballroom, to find Greg, who was to be her next partner.

"Now, good gracious, I hope I've really given Cadet Slowpoke
a broad enough hint," thought Belle. "If he doesn't go ahead
and speak to Laura now, it'll be because he doesn't care. And
Leonard Cameron isn't a bad fellow, even if he does prefer the
yardstick to a sword!"

As for Dick, his evening was spoiled. His sense of honor prevented
his "speaking" to Laura until he felt that his future in the Army
was assured.

Yet spoiled as his evening was, Prescott did his best to make it
a bright occasion for Laura Bentley.

The next morning, while the members of the cadet corps were grinding
at recitations, or boning over study desks in barracks, Mrs. Bentley
and the girls rode down the slope in the stage and boarded a train
for New York.

Dick had not "spoken."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE ENEMIES HAVE AN UNDERSTANDING

After that February hop, Cadet Prescott appeared to give himself
over to one dominating ambition.

That ambition was to secure higher standing in his class.

He became a "bone," and tried so hard to delight his instructors
that he was suspected of boning bootlick with the Academic Board.

For Prescott had dropped Laura out of his mind.

That is to say, he had tried to do it, and Prescott was a young
man with a strong will.

Belle's words, instead of spurring him on to do something that his
own peculiar sense of honor forbade, had killed his vague dream.

After all, Dick reasoned, it was Laura's own good and greatest
happiness that must be considered.

Leonard Cameron, a rising and prosperous young merchant in Gridley,
would doubtless be able to give Laura a much better place in the
world.

In the matter of income, Cameron doubtless enjoyed three or four
times as much as the annual pay of a second lieutenant ($1,700)
amounts to. Besides, Cameron was not much in the way of risking
his life, while an Army officer may be killed at any time, even
in an ordinary riot. A lieutenants widow received only her pension
of a comparatively few dollars a month.

"It would have been almost criminal for me to have thought of
tying Laura's future up to mine," Dick told himself savagely,
as he took a lonely stroll one March afternoon. "I'll have n