Ruth sank back in her chair. The fabric which she had held unconsciously now dropped unheeded from her hand. She could not have told why she felt such a shock of revulsion and disappointment. She had known something like it before, when this man who was to be her husband had shown some strange insensibility to great things which had moved her own heart to its depths. But the feeling had never been so strong as it was now; had never come so near revealing to her the real character of him with whom her whole life was to be spent; and she was still more bewildered and perplexed than shocked or distressed. She thought that she must have misunderstood; that he could not have meant thus to pass over this great national crisis,--this noble offering of a great man's life to the service of his country,--in unfeeling haste to grasp some selfish profit from it. She looked at him wonderingly, with all the light gone out of her face. Being what she was, she could not see that he was just as true to his nature as she was to hers; that he was following it with entire sincerity in looking at the noblest things in life and the greatest things in the world, solely as they affected himself and his own interests. It was not for a nature like hers ever to understand that a nature like his would, if it could, bend the whole universe to his own ends without a doubt that such was its best possible use. Philip Alston, also, was regarding William Pressley with rather an inscrutable look. But his estimate and understanding were fairer than Ruth's, for the reason that he could come nearer to giving the young man his due. He knew that William Pressley was honest and sincere in his vanity and conceit, and was assured that these traits were the worst he possessed. Philip Alston knew men, and he had found that those who honestly thought highly of themselves usually had something, more or less, to found the opinion upon. He had never known a bad man who sincerely thought himself a good one. He knew that many dull men really believed themselves to be intelligent,--but that was a comparatively harmless mistake,--and he had never observed that a woman thought less of a man who thought well of himself. Aside from this surface weakness William Pressley was a most worthy young fellow; far more worthy to be Ruth's husband than any one else in that rough and thinly settled country. The nearer the time for the marriage approached, the more Philip Alston came to believe that he had chosen wisely in selecting William Pressley. Fully convinced at last that he could not do better for her future than to intrust it to this serious, conscientious young man, who was unquestionably fond of her and to whom she was much attached, he now rested content. He still found, to be sure, some amusement in the young man's estimate of himself; but he never doubted its sincerity or questioned its harmlessness. It did not occur to him that Ruth might be troubled by these matters which merely made him