He saunters up to her, and she blushes, while a touch of delight gleams in her eye.
"Do you know," he begins, in a melancholy tone, "that I have sold my birthright, but not for a mess of cabbages, as the camp-meeting brother called it."
They both laugh,—Polly with a mirthful ring, Eugene lazily.
"And now I must take my bag of gold on one end of a stick and my best clothes done up in a bundle on the other, and go out to the new Territories. A young man grows up governor or senator, or some great personage there. I think it must be in the atmosphere,—ozone or odyle, what is it?"
She laughs again, a pleasant sound to hear. He is so very handsome in this mock-plaintive mood, with his beseeching eyes.
"You know I ought to do the world some good."
"Yes. And the Presidents come from the West. I would rather be a President."
"Oh, you couldn't, you know"; and he laughs again. "Is there nothing else that would satisfy your ambition?"
"Nothing!" She seems to shake a shower of gold out of the waving hair on her brow.
"Nothing," he repeats, disconsolately. "Then I may as well go. You see before you a struggling but worthy young man, born to a better heritage, but cruel fate——"