Steve could not believe that such a girl as Ruth Welch could be accepting the addresses of such a man as young Dr. Still. She could not know him. He followed the girl, with his eyes, as long as she was in view. For some moments afterward he sat with a dogged resolution on his face; but it gradually faded away, and he rose and went out, passing down to the street. He had not seen Ruth Welch face to face since the filing of Jacquelin’s suit. But she had never been absent from his thoughts for a moment. He had heard that both she and Mrs. Welch had a great deal of feeling about the suit, and that both had spoken bitterly of him; but Major Welch had received him civilly, even though he had denied his request to be allowed to offer himself as Ruth’s suitor. With a combination of emotions, rather than with any single idea in his mind, Steve strode into the village and up the street. He wanted to get away, and he wanted to be near her and have a look in her face; but he had no definite intention of letting her see him, none, at least, of meeting her. But as he turned a corner into a shady street they were coming back and Steve saw that even at a distance Ruth Welch knew him. He could not turn back; so kept on, and as they passed him he raised his hat. Miss Welch’s escort, with a supercilious look on his face, raised his hat; but the girl looked Steve full in the eyes and cut him dead. The blood sprang into Steve’s face. For any sign she gave, except a sudden whitening, and a contraction of the mouth, she might never have seen him before in all her life. The next second Steve heard her voice starting apparently a very animated conversation with her escort, and heard him reply: “Hurrah! for you, that will settle him;” and break into a loud laugh. Steve did not return to his office that evening. He spent the night wandering about in blind and hopeless gloom. But had Mr. Allen known what occurred during the remainder of that ride he might have found in it some consolation. Miss Ruth had hardly gotten out of hearing of Captain Allen, and her escort had scarcely had time to turn over in his mind his enjoyment of his rival’s discomfiture and his own triumph, when the young lady inexplicably changed and turned on him so viciously and with so biting a sarcasm that he was almost dumfounded. The occasion for her change was so slight that Wash Still was completely mystified. It was only some slighting little speech he made about the man she had just cut dead. “Why don’t you say that to Captain Allen?” she asked, with a sudden flush on her face and a flash in her eyes. “You, at least, have not the excuse of not speaking to him.”