n comfort, out of that book."

"We must get it from Judge Maxwell," said she conclusively.

"A strange lad, a strange lad," reflected the colonel.

"So tall and strong," said she. "Why, from the way his mother spoke of
him, I expected to see a little fellow with trousers up to his knees."

She sat at the table and began cutting the leaves of a new magazine.

Colonel Price lifted his paper, smoothed the crumples out of it,
adjusted the focus of his glasses, and resumed reading the county news.
They seemed contented and happy there, alone, with their fire in the
chimney. Fire itself is a companion. It is like youth in a room.

There was between them a feeling of comradeship and understanding which
seldom lives where youth stands on one hand, age on the other. Years ago
Alice's mother had gone beyond the storms and vexations of this life.
Those two remaining of the little family had drawn together, closing up
the space that her absence had made. There seemed no disparity of years,
and their affection and fidelity had come to be a community pride.

Alice was far from being the frivolous young thing that her father's
banter indicated. She had a train of admirers, never thinning from year
to year, to be certain, for it had been the regular fate of adolescent
male Shelbyville to get itself tangled up in love with Alice Price ever
since her high-school days. Many of the youngsters soon outgrew the
affection; but it seemed to become a settled and permanent affliction in
others, threatening to incapacitate them from happiness, according to
their young view of it, and blast their ambitions in the face of the
world.

Every girl, to greater or less extent, has her courtiers of that kind.
Nature has arranged this sort of tribute for the little queen-bees of
humanity's hives. And so there were other girls in Shelbyville who had
their train of beaus, but there was none quite so popular or so much
desired as Alice Price.

Alice was considered the first beauty of the place. Added to this
primary desirability was the fact that, in the fine gradations of
pedigrees and the stringent exactions of blood which the patrician
families of Shelbyville drew, Colonel Price and his daughter were the
topmost plumes on the peacock of aristocracy. Other young ladies seemed
to make all haste to assuage the pangs of at least one young man by
marrying him, and to blunt the hopes of the rest by that decisive act.
Not so Alice Price. She was frank a