Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/29

 few moments later, it seemed to have been wholly due to the beggar's having taken advantage of her excitement after meeting Gerry Hull and her uneasiness at being followed by the German. She had no use for two boxes of cheap pencils and she could not afford to give a dollar to a street cripple who probably was an impostor. She felt that she had acted quite crazily; now she had to take a North State Street car to return to her room.

She had been saving, out of her money which she kept for herself, a ridiculous little fund to enable her perhaps to take advantage of a chance to "do" something some day; now because Lieutenant Hull had spoken kindly to her, she had flung away a dollar. She tried to keep her thought from her foolishness; and she succeeded in this readily by reviewing all the slight incident of her meeting with Gerry Hull. She had known something about him ever since she was a little girl, and pictures of him—a little boy with his grandfather—and articles about his grandfather and about him, too, appeared in the Chicago newspaper which her father read. Ruth could recall her father telling her about the great Andrew Hull, how he had come to Chicago as a poor boy and had made himself one of the greatest men in the industrial life of the nation; how he owned land and city buildings and great factories and railroads; and the reason that the newspapers so often printed the picture of the little boy was because some day he would own them all.

And Ruth knew that this had come true; and that the little boy, whose bold, likeable face had looked out upon her from the pictures; the tall, handsome, athletic and reckless youth who had gone to school in the East and,