“Oh, I don’t mind your being abstracted,” she answered simply, “so long as I am not the cause of it.”

“You-----”

Dick checked himself quickly.

He had been right on the point of admitting that she had been the cause of his abstraction, and such a statement as that would have called for an abundance of further explanation.

So he forced himself into a peal of laughter that sounded nearly natural.

“If I were to tell you what a ridiculous thing I was thinking about, Laura!” he chuckled.

Then his West Point training against all forms of deceit led him to wondering, at once, whether Mr. Cameron could truthfully be defined as “a ridiculous thing.”

“Tell me,” smiled the girl patiently.

“Not I,” defied Prescott gayly.  “Then you would find me more ridiculous than the thing about which I was thinking.”

“Oh!” she replied, and the cadet fancied that his companion spoke in a tone of more or less hurt.

But, at least, Dick could look straight into her face now, as they talked, and every instant he realized more and more keenly how lovely Miss Bentley was growing to be.

They were driving down sweet-scented country lanes now.  The whole scene fitted romance.  The cadet remembered Flirtation Walk, at West Point, and it struck him that there was danger, at the present moment, of Flirtation Drive.

“I wonder what the dear girl is thinking about at this present moment?” pondered Dick.

“I wonder what it was that made him so abstracted, and then so suddenly merry?” was the thought in Miss Bentley’s mind.

“That was a very pretty road we came through before we turned into this one,” commented Dick at a hazard.

“I didn’t notice it,” replied Laura.  “Where are we now?  Oh, yes!  I know the locality now.”

“You have driven out here before—–­with Mr. Cameron?”

The words were out ere Cadet Prescott could recall them.  He felt indescribably angry with himself.  In the first place, the question he had asked was really none of his business.  In the second place, his inquiry, under the circumstances, was a rude one.

“Mr. Cameron was in the party,” Laura replied readily.  “There was quite a number of us; it was a ’bus ride one May afternoon.  We came out to gather wild flowers.”

“If I had the right,” flamed up within the cadet, “I’d soon make Mr. Cameron my business, or else I’d be some of his.  But it wouldn’t be fair.  I’m not through West Point yet, and I may never be.  Until my future is fairly assured I’m not going to ask the sweetest girl on earth to commit her future to my hands.  Even if I felt that I could, a cadet is forbidden to marry and a two years’ engagement is a fearfully long one to ask of a girl.  And a girl like Laura has a chance to meet hundreds of more satisfactory fellows than I in two years.”

It required all the young soldier’s will power to keep silent on the one subject uppermost in his mind.  And even Dick realized that some very trivial circumstance was likely to unseat his firm resolve.