“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 nothing but my pay, if I do graduate.  A fellow like Cameron can allow his wife more for pin money than my whole years pay will come to.  Really, I’ve no right to marry any but a rich girl, who has her own income.  And, even if I fell in love with a rich girl, I wouldn’t have the nerve to propose to her.  I’d feel like a cheap fortune hunter.”

Having made up his mind to put Laura Bentley out of his inner thoughts, Prescott did not write her as often as formerly.

He wrote often enough, and pleasantly enough to preserve the courtesies of life.  Yet keen-witted Belle Meade was not long in discovering, from what Laura thought were chance remarks, that Dick was “dropping away” as a correspondent.

So, too, Laura’s letters were fewer and briefer.

“Dick didn’t really care for her, I guess,” Belle decided, almost vengefully.  “Then the bigger idiot he is, for there aren’t many girls like Laura born in any one century!  But Dick sees a good many girls at West Point, and perhaps he has grown indifferent to his old friends.  There are a good many very ‘swell’ girls who visit West Point, too.  Horrors!  I wonder if Dick and Greg think that we are too countrified?”

After the first few weeks, with his resolute nature triumphing over anything that he set his mind to, Prescott found himself thinking less about Cameron.  It was practically a settled matter, anyway, between Laura and Cameron, so Dick thought, and Cadet Prescott had his greatly improved standing in his class to console him for any losses in other directions.  Yet Dick would not have dared to confess, even to himself, how little class standing did console him.

So hard had been study in the last few weeks that Prescott had all but forgotten the existence of turnback Haynes.  They were not in the same section in any of the studies, nor did the two mingle at all in barracks life.  Neither went to the hops now, either.

“Is Prescott afraid of me—–­or what?” wondered Haynes.  “Perhaps he hopes I have forgotten him, but I haven’t.  One thing is clear he doesn’t intend to do anything about that train incident, or he’d have done it long ago.  If he thinks I have forgotten my dislike of him, he may be glad enough to have it just that way.  Bah, as if I could ever get over my dislike for a bootlick like Prescott!  I’d like to get him out of the Army for good!  I wonder if I can’t, between now and June?  I’d like my future in the Army a whole lot better with Prescott out of it.”

So Haynes began taking to moody, lonely walks when he had any time for such outlet to his evil, feelings.

It is one of the strangest freaks of queer human nature that one who has once done another an injury ever after hates the injured one with an added intensity of hatred.