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Kansas University Weekly.
She hated the narrow grinding life. Oh you have no idea how hateful it all was to her, how utterly bare and empty her life was, until—one winter—there came to her father's ranch, a man—a cowboy, who seemed to her the nearest approach to culture she had ever known. He was not an educated or a refined man, and in a vague sort of a way she realized his inferiority, but he had travelled, and had been a keen observer, and she was very young and oh so lonely. All that winter they were constantly together, they rode, talked and read together, and the girl's parents were glad of anything that would divert her mind from her distasteful life. They were very much together. I don't think her parents realized and I know she didn't, how very much they were in each others company. But he was very companionable and her life had been so barren.
But in the spring, money came to her father from an unexpected source, and they were able to leave the west, and move to an eastern town, a college town in fact, very much like this.
I don't think you can realize all that the change meant to the girl. She was considered bright, and was not bad looking, and it seemed as though she stepped right into a niche that had been waiting for her. She was immediately thrown into the atmosphere of culture and refinement for which she had always longed. And she was happy, you have no idea how happy she was, as she felt herself growing and broadening amid her new surroundings.
"But she corresponded with the man whom she had known so well, not that she cared at all but just because—oh I don't know why she did it-I suppose it gave her pleasure. She wrote to him of the progress she was making with her studies, of the people she met, and of the parties she attended. And he wrote to her of well all there is to write of there,-horses and cattle and weather. Of course she didn't care for such things, for they were just a part of the old distasteful life. But she simulated an interest in them, I don't know why, I suppose it was only natural.
It was not long before she was prepared for college, and then it seemed as though she really began to live. Then, before very long, there came into her life—a man, in whom it seemed to her, was embodied all the goodness and culture and nobility she had ever conceived of. She was older then, and she cared for him very much and knew that he cared for her, though there was no engagement between them.
But in a little while—she got a letter from this young man in the west, you know she had been corresponding with him all the time. He told her how hard he had been working to stock a ranch of his own, how successful he had been and how lonely he was, and then he told her that he loved her, and that if she would marry him he would do his best to make her happy.
It was all a surprise to the girl, she had had no idea of such a thing, and at first she hardly knew what to do. Of course even if she hadn't cared for this other man, it would have been out of the question. She tried to tell him in a letter how utterly impossible it was. She tried to make it just as easy as she could, but still show him how hopeless anything of the kind was. Well several days passed, and one evening she found in the newspaper a little paragraph, telling of how her cowboy friend had killed himself. It said no one could give any reason for it, as he had burned all his letters and papers just before shooting himself. But she knew the reason."
The girl stopped speaking. The firelight, as it shone upon her hands showed that she was nervously twisting the rings on her fingers.
"And what is the point on which you want my judgment?" he asked.
"Was she to blame?"
"Yes, I think she was," he said slowly. "In corresponding with man, she encouraged him. He was, no doubt, somewhat above his associates, and it seems to me she would be the very person to realize how much the friendship of a refined girl might grow to mean to such a man, and realizing this, it was certainly her duty to avoid anything that might result in unhappiness