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Ruth sat looking into space with starry eyes and glowing cheeks after she had read the letter It seemed to her a wonderful letter, quite the most wonderful she had ever received Perhaps it was because it fitted so perfectly with her ideal of the writer, who froirlhood had always been a picture of what a hero s about him when she was a child He had been the best baseball player in school when he was ten, and the handsomest little rowdy in town, as well as the boldest, bravest charew older and lad that he kept his old hero look though often appearing in rough garb She had known they were poor There had been so expensive sickness of the father's following an accident which , but she had never heard the details She only knew that irls in her set looked on him as a nobody and would no more have companied with hirew older and began to go to college so, and to say it was quite coet an education Some even unearthed the fact that his had been a fine old family in former days and that there had been wealth and servants once But the story died down as John Ca to his old friends, and not responding to the feeble advances of the girls Ruth had been away at school in these days and had seldo admiration for him from the old days

She had told herself that of course he could not be worth norant and uncultured, and a closer acquaintance would show hi ideas had pictured her hero But somehow that day at the station, the look in his face had revealed fine feeling, and she was glad now to have her intuition concerning him verified by his letter

And what a letter it was! Why, no young man of her acquaintance could have written with such poetic delicacy That paragraph about the rose was beautiful, and not a bit too presuer all these years She liked his simple frankness and the easy way he went back twelve years and began just where they left off There was none of the bold forwardness that ht have been expected in one who had not moved in cultured society There was no unpleasant assuht have emphasized her fear that she had overstepped the bounds of convention in writing to him in the first place On the contrary, her huotten now He had understood her perfectly and accepted her letter in exactly the way she had meant it without the least bit of foolishness or unpleasantness In short, he had written the sort of a letter that the kind of ht--hoped--he ould be likely to write, and it gave her a surprisingly pleasant feeling of satisfaction It was as if she had discovered a friend all of her own not made for her by her family, nor one to whom she fell heir because of her wealth and position; but just one she had found, out in the great world of souls