CHAPTER XVIII.
THE ENEMIES HAVE AN UNDERSTANDING After that February hop, Cadet Prescott appeared to give himself over to one dominating ambition.
That ambition was to secure higher standing in his class.
He became a "bone," and tried so hard to delight his instructors that he was suspected of boning bootlick with the Academic Board.
For Prescott had dropped Laura out of his mind.
That is to say, he had tried to do it, and Prescott was a young man with a strong will.
Belle's words, instead of spurring him on to do something that his own peculiar sense of honor forbade, had killed his vague dream.
After all, Dick reasoned, it was Laura's own good and greatest happiness that must be considered.
Leonard Cameron, a rising and prosperous young merchant in Gridley, would doubtless be able to give Laura a much better place in the world.
In the matter of income, Cameron doubtless enjoyed three or four times as much as the annual pay of a second lieutenant ($1,700) amounts to.

Besides, Cameron was not much in the way of risking his life, while an Army officer may be killed at any time, even in an ordinary riot.

A lieutenants widow received only her pension of a comparatively few dollars a month.
"It would have been almost criminal for me to have thought of tying Laura's future up to mine," Dick told himself savagely, as he took a lonely stroll one March afternoon.

"I'll have nothing but my pay, if I do graduate.

A fellow like Cameron can allow his wife more for pin money than my whole years pay will come to.