"But suppose one isn't after any of those things," he said. "Suppose he thinks of life as simply an opportunity for self-development. He starts at it when he's born, and the more of it he does the more he has to do. And--he can't possibly fail, and every moment is a triumph--and----" He came back from his excursion and smiled apologetically at her. But she was evidently interested. "Don't you think a man ought to have ambition?" she asked. She was thinking of her lover and his audacious schemes for making himself powerful. "Oh--a man is what he is. Ambition means so many different things." "But shouldn't you like to be rich and famous and--all that?" "It depends----" Scarborough felt that if he said what was in his mind it might sound like cant. So he changed the subject. "Just now my ambition is to get off that zoology condition." IV. A DUMONT TRIUMPH. But in the first week of her second month Pauline's interest in her surroundings vanished. She was corresponding with Jennie Atwater and Jennie began to write of Dumont--he had returned to Saint X; Caroline Sylvester, of Cleveland, was visiting his mother; it was all but certain that Jack and Caroline would marry. "Her people want it," Jennie went on--she pretended to believe that Jack and Pauline had given each the other up--"and Jack's father is determined on it. They're together morning, noon and evening. She's really very swell, though _I_ don't think she's such a raving beauty." Following this came the Saint X News-Bulletin with a broad hint that the engagement was about to be announced. "It's ridiculously false," said Pauline to herself; but she tossed for hours each night, trying to soothe the sick pain in her heart. And while she scouted the possibility of losing him, she was for the first time entertaining it--a cloud in the great horizon of her faith in the future; a small cloud, but black and bold against the blue. And she had no suspicion that he had returned from Chicago deliberately to raise that cloud. A few days later another letter from Jennie, full of gossip about Jack and Caroline, a News-Bulletin with a long article about Caroline, ending with an even broader hint of her approaching marriage--and Dumont sent Pauline a note from the hotel in Villeneuve, five miles from Battle Field: "I must see you. Do not deny me. It means everything to both of us--what I want to say to you." And he asked her to meet him in the little park in Battle Field on the bank of the river where no one but the factory hands and their families ever went, and they only in the evenings. The hour he fixed was ten the next morning, and she "cut" ancient history and was there. As he advanced to meet her she thought she had never before appreciated how handsome he was, how distinguished-looking--perfectly her ideal of what a man should be, especially in that important, and at Battle Field neglected, matter, dress.