he said.

"That's an unmanly whimper," said his father contemptuously.

"Why, Harry, Bob Bennett didn't get either killed or wounded," said his
mother with that defective ratiocination which it is a pretty woman's
privilege to indulge in at her own sweet will.

Harry withdrew from the mortifying conference under the plea of the
necessity of going to his room to remove the grime of travel.

He was smarting with rage and humiliation. His panoply of conceit was
pierced for the first time since the completion of his collegiate course
sent him forth into the world a being superior, in his own esteem,
to the accidents and conditions that the mass of inferior mortals are
subject to. Yet he found reasons to account for his parent's defection
to the ranks of his enemies.

"It's no new thing," he said, while carefully dressing for a call upon
Rachel in the evening, "for father to be harsh and unjust to me, and
mother has one of her nervous spells, when everything goes wrong with
her."

"Anyhow," he continued, "there's Ned Burnleigh, who understands me and
will do me justice, and he amounts to more than all of Sardis--except
Rachel, who loves me and will always believe that what I do is right."

He sat down at his desk and wrote a long letter to Ned, inveighing
bitterly against the stupidity and malice of people living in small
villages, and informing him of his intention to remove to Cincinnati as
soon as an opening could be found for him there, which he begged Ned to
busy himself in discovering.

Attired in his most becoming garb, and neglecting nothing that could
enhance his personal appearance, he walked slowly up the hill in the
evening to Rachel Bond's house. The shrinkage which his self-sufficiency
had suffered had left room for a wonderful expansion of his affection
for Rachel, whose love and loyalty were now essential to him, to
compensate for the falling away of others. The question of whether
he should break with her was now one the answering of which could be
postponed indefinitely. There was no reason why he should not enjoy the
sweet privileges of an affianced lover during his stay in Sardis. What
would happen afterward would depend upon the shape that things took in
his new home.

He found Rachel sitting on the piazza. Though dressed in the deepest
and plainest black she had never looked so surpassingly beautiful. As is
usually the case with young women of her type of beauty, grief had toned
down the ric