lief to the face of the girl, the girl who looked at
him differently somehow.

The impression she made on him was one of daintiness and light; her
eager face and her sweet voice, almost childish in its thin quality,
appealed to him with singular force.

She was strange to him, in accent and life; she was good and sweet, he
felt sure of that, but she seemed so far away in her manner of thought.
He wished he had been dressed a little better; his old hat troubled him
especially.

The girls he had known, even the daintiest of them, could drive horses
and were not afraid of cows. Their way of talking was generally direct
and candid, or had those familiar inflections which were comprehensible
to him. She was alien.

Was she a girl? Sometimes she seemed a woman--when her face sobered a
moment--then again she seemed a child. It was this change of expression
that bewildered and fascinated him.

Then her lips were so scarlet and her level brown eyebrows wavered about
so beautifully! Sometimes one had arched while the other remained quiet;
this gave a winsome look of brightness and roguishness to her face.

He came at last to the strangest thing of all: she had looked at him,
every time he spoke, as if she were surprised at finding herself able to
understand his way of speech.

He worked it all out at last. They all looked upon him as belonging to
the American peasantry; he belonged to a lower world--a world of
service. He was brick, they were china.

Saulisbury and Mrs. Thayer were perfectly frank about it; they spoke
from the English standpoint. The Major and Mrs. Saulisbury had been
touched by the Western spirit and were trying to be just to him, with
more or less unconscious patronization.

As his thoughts ran on, his fury came back, and he hammered and groaned
and cursed as he tossed to and fro on his bed, determined to go back
where the American ideas still held--back to the democracy of Lodi and
Cresco.

III.

These spring days were days of growth to the young man. He grew older
and more thoughtful, and seldom joked with the other men.

There came to the surface moods which he had not known before. There
came times when his teeth set together like the clutch of a wolf, as
some elemental passion rose from the depths of his inherited self.

His father had been a rather morose man, jealous of his rights, quick to
anger, but just in his impulses. Arthur had inherited these stronger
traits, but they had been c