milarly affected toward
him, and he allowed all the suppressed passion of his nature full vent
in a declaration of love. The girl was deeply moved by this revelation
of the heart of a strong man made tender as a woman's by a power
centering in her own humble self, and, being utterly without experience
of the emotion even in its protective form of calf-love, which is the
varioloid of the genuine infection, she imagined through sheer sympathy
that she shared his passion. So she assented with maidenly reserve to
his plea that she promise to marry him when he should return and
provide a home for her. Her more cautious mother secured a
modification of this pledge by limiting the time that Echo should wait
for him to one year. If at the expiration of that period Lane did not
return to claim her promise, or did not write making satisfactory
arrangements for continuance of the engagement, Echo was to be
considered free to marry whom she chose.

Soon after Lane's departure Mrs. Allen persuaded the Colonel to send
Echo east to a New England finishing-school for girls, where her mother
hoped that her budding love for Lane might be nipped in the frigid
atmosphere of intellectual culture, if not, indeed, supplanted by a
saving interest in young men in general, and, perhaps, in some
particular scion of a blue-blooded Boston family.

The plan succeeded in part only. The companionship of her
schoolfellows, her music and art-lessons, her books (during the limited
periods allotted to serious study and reading), and, above all, her
attrition at receptions with another order of men than that she had
known in the rough, uncultured West, occupied her mind so fully that
poor Dick Lane, who was putting a thought of Echo Allen in every blow
of his pick, received only the scraps of her attention.

Dick had few opportunities to mail a letter, and none of them for
receiving one. Unpractised in writing, his epistolary compositions
were crude in the extreme, being wholly confined to bald statements of
fact. Had he been as tender on paper as he was in his words and
accents when he kissed away her tears at parting, her regard for him
would have had fuel to feed on and might have kindled into genuine
love. As it was, she was forced to admit that, in comparison, with the
brilliant university men with whom she conversed, Dick Lane,
intellectually, was as quartz to diamond.

On the other band, she contrasted Dick in the essential point of
man