He had just come to Z---- (I must have a letter for my nameless town,
and I have gone through the whole alphabet for it, and picked up a
crooked stick at last), and the new group of people he had got among
interested him. He liked problems and experiments. They were what he
excelled in at the Military School. This was his first furlough; and
it was since his entrance at the Academy that his brother, Dr.
Ingleside, had come to Z----, to take the vacant practice of an old
physician, disabled from continuing it.

Dakie and Leslie Goldthwaite and Mrs. Ingleside were old friends;
almost as old as Mrs. Ingleside and the doctor.

Ruth Holabird had a very young girl's romance of admiration for one
older, in her feeling toward Leslie. She had never known any one just
like her; and, in truth, Leslie was different, in some things, from
the little world of girls about her. In the "each and all" of their
pretty groupings and pleasant relations she was like a bit of fresh,
springing, delicate vine in a bouquet of bright, similarly beautiful
flowers; taking little free curves and reaches of her own, just as she
had grown; not tied, nor placed, nor constrained; never the central or
most brilliant thing; but somehow a kind of life and grace that helped
and touched and perfected all.

There was something very real and individual about her; she was no
"girl of the period," made up by the fashion of the day. She would
have grown just as a rose or a violet would, the same in the first
quarter of the century or the third. They called her "grandmotherly"
sometimes, when a certain quaint primitiveness that was in her showed
itself. And yet she was the youngest girl in all that set, as to
simpleness and freshness and unpretendingness, though she was in her