ays,
Harvey?"

"You bet," he retorted, "Millville is flourishing. We'll soon have a real
city here. Oh, Miss Welcome, let me make you acquainted with my friend,
Mr. Michael Grogan of Chicago."

Patience accepted the introduction with flushed reserve.

"I'm right glad to know you," stated Mr. Grogan, removing his hat
gallantly and wiping a perspiring brow with his handkerchief. "But let me
tell you I don't think much of your friend, Harvey Spencer. Sure, I've
been riding with him for two hours and you're the first pleasant object
he's shown me. And such a ride! It's a certainty that this young fellow
knows every bump and thank-ye-ma'am in the village and he's taken me full
speed over all of them. I feel like I'd been churned. But I'll forgive
him all that now--now that he's shown me you."

There was a sincerity in Mr. Grogan's raillery that swept away Patience's
reserve. Besides, he was over fifty.

"Sure," she said, slyly imitating Mr. Grogan's brogue, "you've been
kissing the blarney stone, Mr. Grogan."

"Will ye listen to that now?" said Grogan enthusiastically, as he started
to clamber off the wagon.

"Sit still, Mr. Grogan," said Harvey, laughing.

"But didn't you hear her, man alive? Sure, she's Irish--"

"No, I'm not," put in Patience, "but I've heard of the blarney stone."

"Look at that, now," said Grogan, returning to his seat with an air of
keen disappointment. "And I was just longin' to see someone from the Ould
Sod. I thought--"

"How do you like riding with Harvey?" inquired Patience, changing the
subject.

"Well," said Grogan plaintively, "if I were twenty years younger maybe it
would be good exercise, but with my years, Miss, 'tis just plain
exhausting."

Here Harvey started the roan colt off again. "See you later," he called
back to Patience, "I'm stopping at your house."

"So that's Tom Welcome's daughter, is it?" said Grogan as they got out of
hearing.

"That's one of them," said Harvey, "but you ought to see the other."

"The old man now," went on Grogan, "is a good deal of a lush."

"The girls can't help what their father is," retorted Harvey, bridling.

"I know, I know," went on Mr. Grogan. "Such things happen in the best of
families."

"No, and you can't blame Tom Welcome much, either," went on Harvey. "He
was drove to drink. He invented an electrical machine that would have
made a fortune for him and some one stole it from him. It wasn't the loss
of the money that sent him