“I saw very little of him,” Dick replied.

“But what do you think of him?” Belle insisted.

“I think that, if he is Laura’s friend, he must be a fine fellow,” Dick replied with enthusiasm.

A slight shudder of disappointment passed over Belle.

“Are you beginning to feel chilly, Belle?” asked Dick anxiously.

“If I am, its nervously, not because I am really cold,” replied Miss Meade dryly.

“Why did you ask me what I think of Mr. Cameron?”

“Because I am interested in knowing,” Belle answered.  “Mr. Cameron is with Laura a great deal these times.”

“Is he?” asked Dick, with another sinking at the heart.

“Oh, yes,” Belle replied.  “Some folks in Gridley are nodding their heads wisely, and pretending they can guess what is going to happen before long.  But I’m 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.