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. Really, I've no right to marry any but a rich girl, who has
her own income. And, even if I fell in love with a rich girl,
I wouldn't have the nerve to propose to her.
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