ter her frankness and her force, and it did not cross his mind that
the heiress of millions might cast tender eyes upon the penniless sons
of New England farmers. He said to himself with impatient recklessness
that he ought not to and would not fall in love with her. There was too
great a distance between them. It would be King Cophetua and the
beggar-maid reversed. Clerks at one hundred and fifty dollars a month
were not supposed to aspire to only daughters of bonanza kings in the
circle from which Faraday had come. So he visited the Ryans, assuring
himself that he was a friend of the family, who would dance at Miss
Genevieve's wedding with the lightest of hearts.

The Chinese butler had grown familiar with Faraday's attractive
countenance and his unabbreviated English, when late one warm and sunny
afternoon the young man pulled the bell of the great oaken door of the
Ryans' lion-guarded home. In answer to his queries for the ladies, he
learned that they were out; but the Mongolian functionary, after
surveying him charily through the crack of the door, admitted that Mr.
Ryan was within, and conducted the visitor into his presence.

Barney Ryan, suffering from a slight sprain in his ankle, sat at ease in
a little sitting-room in the back of the house. Mr. Ryan, being
irritable and in some pain, the women-folk had relaxed the severity of
their dominion, and allowed him to sit unchecked in his favorite costume
for the home circle--shirt sleeves and a tall beaver hat. Beside him on
the table stood bare and undecorated array of bottles, a glass, and a
silver water-pitcher.

Mr. Ryan was now some years beyond sixty, but had that tremendous vigor
of frame and constitution that distinguished the pioneers--an attribute
strangely lacking in their puny and degenerate sons. This short and
chunky old man, with his round, thick head, bristling hair and beard,
and huge red neck, had still a fiber as tough as oak. He looked coarse,
uncouth, and stupid, but in his small gray eyes shone the alert and
unconquerable spirit which marked the pioneers as the giants of the
West, and which had carried him forward over every obstacle to the
summit of his ambitions. Barney Ryan was restless in his confinement;
for, despite his age and the completeness of his success, his life was
still with the world of men where the bull-necked old miner was a king.
At home the women rather domineered over him, and unconsciously made him
feel his social defic