Wilson took a pessimistic view. "I defy the angel Gabriel to keep his temper if he should get himself appointed clerk. If I was a married man I could make a better mark; but there it is--they can't see me." He ended with a deep sigh. Curtis took advantage of Lawson's letter to write again to Elsie, and though he considered it a very polite and entirely circumspect performance, his fervor of gladness burned through every line, and the girl as she read it fell to musing on the singularity of the situation. He was in her mind very often, now; the romance and the poetry of the work he was doing began at last to appeal to her, and the knowledge that she, in a sense, shared the possibilities with him, was distinctly pleasurable. She had perception enough to feel also the force of the contrast in their lives, he toiling thanklessly on a barren, sun-smit land, in effort to lead a subject race to self-supporting freedom, while she, dabbling in art for art's sake, sat in a secure place and watched him curiously. "How well he writes," she thought, returning to his letter. His sentences clutched her like strong hands, and she could not escape them. As she read she drew again the splendid lines of his head in profile, and then, a sentence later, it seemed that he was looking straight into her eyes, grave of countenance, involved in some moral question whose solution he considered essential to his happiness and to the welfare of his people. Surely he was a most uncommon soldier. When she had finished reading she was sincerely moved to reply. She had nothing definitely in mind to say, and yet somehow she visualized him at his desk waiting an answer. "The worst of it is, we seem to have no topic in common except his distressing Indians," she said, as she returned to her work. "Even art to him means painting the redmen sympathetically."