And then, seeing her interest and sympathy, he went on to tell of three little ones, orphaned by the plague, and left alone and utterly helpless, in a cabin on the Wilderness Road.  As he spoke, he remembered with a pang of self-reproach, that Father Orin was with them now and waiting for him.  He rose suddenly, saying that he must go, but a slight noise at the door caused him to pause and turn.  It was William Pressley coming in, and Ruth went forward to meet him, and introduced him to the doctor, who sat down again for a few moments.  The two young men then talked with one another as strangers do, of the current topics of the day and the country, speaking mostly of the Shawnee danger—­the one subject then most earnestly and universally discussed throughout the wilderness.  The nearest approach to a personal tone was in William Pressley’s formal expression of thanks.  Paul Colbert put these aside as formally as they were offered, and in a moment more he got up to take leave.  Yet in that brief space the two men had begun to dislike each other.

This was natural enough on the part of William Pressley.  It is indeed the first instinct of his kind toward any equal or superior.  When a man’s or a woman’s vanity is so great that it instinctively and instantly levies on all within reach—­demanding incense—­nothing can be so dislikeful as a bearing which refuses to swing the censer.  From its very nature it must instantly resent any such conscious or unconscious claim to equality, to say nothing of superiority.  Those so afflicted must of necessity like only their inferiors and must have only inferiors for friends, if they have any friends at all.  So that this is maybe the real reason why many reasonably good and perfectly sincere men and women go almost friendless through useful and blameless lives.  And this was William Pressley’s natural feeling toward Paul Colbert.  The honest, sincere young lawyer could have forgiven the honest, sincere young doctor almost any real sin or weakness and have liked him well enough; but he could not forgive the polite indifference of his manner toward himself, or his looking over his head at Ruth, or turning from him to speak to David.  Least of all could he forgive him for being at that moment the most conspicuous figure in the whole region, on account of his single-handed struggle with the mysterious disease, which, defying the other doctors, had been devastating the new settlements of the wilderness.  Nor could the difference in their aims affect this feeling in the least.  To a nature like William Pressley’s, anything won by another is something taken from himself.  Yet the dislike for Paul Colbert, which thus hardened within him, had no taint of jealousy in the ordinary sense of that term.  He did not think of Ruth at all in the matter.  It did not occur to him to associate her with this stranger, or with any one but himself.  It was in keeping with his character for him to be slower than a less vain man to suspect her—­or any one whom he knew—­of personal preference for another than himself; for vanity of this supreme order has its comforts as well as its torments.