“Well,” said the young man hesitatingly, “not that way.  I take a glass of wine now and then in company, you know—­”

“Yes, I know,” sighed the girl.  “Men are all alike.  Mother used to say so.  She said men were different from women.  They had to drink.  She said they all did it.  Only she said her father never did; but he was very good, though he had to work hard.”

“Indeed,” said the young man, his color rising in the moonlight, “indeed, you make a mistake.  I don’t drink at all, not that way.  I’m not like them.  I—­why, I only—­well, the fact is, I don’t care a red cent about the stuff anyway; and I don’t want you to think I’m like them.  If it will do you any good, I’ll never touch it again, not a drop.”

He said it earnestly.  He was trying to vindicate himself.  Just why he should care to do so he did not know, only that all at once it was very necessary that he should appear different in the eyes of this girl from, the other men she had known.

“Will you really?” she asked, turning to look in his face.  “Will you promise that?”

“Why, certainly I will,” he said, a trifle embarrassed that she had taken him at his word.  “Of course I will.  I tell you it’s nothing to me.  I only took a glass at the club occasionally when the other men were drinking, and sometimes when I went to banquets, class banquets, you know, and dinners—­”

Now the girl had never heard of class banquets, but to take a glass occasionally when the other men were drinking was what her brothers did; and so she sighed, and said:  “Yes, you may promise, but I know you won’t keep it.  Father promised too; but, when he got with the other men, it did no good.  Men are all alike.”

“But I’m not,” he insisted stoutly.  “I tell you I’m not.  I don’t drink, and I won’t drink.  I promise you solemnly here under God’s sky that I’ll never drink another drop of intoxicating liquor again if I know it as long as I live.”

He put out his hand toward her, and she put her own into it with a quick grasp for just an instant.

“Then you’re not like other men, after all,” she said with a glad ring in her voice.  “That must be why I wasn’t so very much afraid of you when I woke up and found you standing there.”

A distinct sense of pleasure came over him at her words.  Why it should make him glad that she had not been afraid of him when she had first seen him in the wilderness he did not know.  He forgot all about his own troubles.  He forgot the lady in the automobile.  Right then and there he dropped her out of his thoughts.  He did not know it; but she was forgotten, and he did not think about her any more during that journey.  Something had erased her.  He had run away from her, and he had succeeded most effectually, more so than he knew.

There in the desert the man took his first temperance pledge, urged thereto by a girl who had never heard of a temperance pledge in her life, had never joined a woman’s temperance society, and knew nothing about women’s crusades.  Her own heart had taught her out of a bitter experience just how to use her God-given influence.