If the truth were known, he neither suspected nor could he be made to believe that Ruth had any troubles.  The facts were that he had given her all his heart and had been ready to lay himself at her feet, that being the accepted term in his mental vocabulary—­and she would have none of him.  She had let him understand so—­ rebuffed him—­not once, but every time he had tried to broach the subject of his devotion;—­once in the Geneseo arbor, and again on that morning when he had really crawled to her side because he could no longer live without seeing her.  The manly thing to do now was to accept the situation:  to do his work; look after his employer’s interests, read, study, run over whenever he could to see Peter—­and these were never-to-be-forgotten oases in the desert of his despair—­and above all never to forget that he owed a duty to Miss Ruth in which no personal wish of his own could ever find a place.  She was alone and without an escort except her father, who was often so absorbed in his work, or so tired at night, as to be of little help to her.  Moreover, his Chief had, in a way, added his daughter’s care to his other duties.  “Can’t you take Ruth to-night—­” or “I wish you’d meet her at the ferry,” or “if you are going to that dinner in New York, at so-and-so’s, would you mind calling for her—­” etc., etc.  Don’t start, dear reader.  These two came of a breed where the night key and the daughter go together and where a chaperon would be as useless as a policeman locked inside a bank vault.

And so the boy struggled on, growing in bodily strength and mental experience, still the hero among the men for his heroic rescue of the “Boss”—­a reputation which he never lost; making friends every day both in the village and in New York and keeping them; absorbed in his slender library, and living within his means, which small as they were, now gave him two rooms at Mrs. Hicks’s,—­one of which he had fitted up as a little sitting-room and in which Ruth had poured the first cup of tea, her father and some of the village people being guests.

His one secret—­and it was his only one—­he kept locked up in his heart, even from Peter.  Why worry the dear old fellow, he had said to himself a dozen times, since nothing would ever come of it.

While all this had been going on in the house of MacFarlane, much more astonishing things had been developing in the house of Breen.

The second Mukton Lode scoop,—­the one so deftly handled the night of Arthur Breen’s dinner to the directors,—­had somehow struck a snag in the scooping with the result that most of the “scoopings” had been spilled over the edge there to be gathered up by the gamins of the Street, instead of being hived in the strong boxes of the scoopers.  Some of the habitues in the orchestra chairs in Breen’s office had cursed loud and deep when they saw their margins melt away; and one or two of the directors had broken out into open revolt, charging Breen with the fiasco, but most of the others had held their peace.  It was better to crawl away into the tall grass there to nurse their wounds than to give the enemy a list of the killed and wounded.  Now and then an outsider—­one who had watched the battle from afar—­saw more of the fight than the contestants themselves.  Among these was Garry Minott.