ame
cottage on a bill above the Spencer mill, with a bit of waste land that
he turned into a thrifty garden. Anna was born there, and her mother
had died there ten years later. But long enough before that he had added
four rooms, and bought an adjoining lot. At that time the hill had been
green; the way to the little white house had been along and up a winding
path, where in the spring the early wild flowers came out on sunny
banks, and the first buds of the neighborhood were on Klein's own
lilac-bushes.

He had had a magnificent sense of independence those days, and of
freedom.

He voted religiously, and now and then in the evenings he had been the
moderate member of a mild socialist group. Theoretically, he believed
that no man should amass a fortune by the labor of others. Actually he
felt himself well paid, a respected member of society, and a property
owner.

In the early morning, winter and summer, he emerged into the small side
porch of his cottage and there threw over himself a pail of cold water
from the well outside. Then he rubbed down, dressed in the open air
behind the old awning hung there, took a dozen deep breaths and a cup of
coffee, and was off for work. The addition of a bathroom, with running
hot water, had made no change in his daily habits.

He was very strict with Anna, and with the women who, one after another,
kept house for him.

"I'll have no men lounging around," was his first instruction on
engaging them. And to Anna his solicitude took the form almost of
espionage. The only young man he tolerated about the place was a distant
relative. Rudolph Klein.

On Sunday evenings Rudolph came in to supper. But even Rudolph found it
hard to get a word with the girl alone.

"What's eating him, anyhow," he demanded of Anna one Sunday evening,
when by the accident of a neighbor calling old Herman to the gate, he
had the chance of a word.

"He knows a lot about you fellows," Anna had said. "And the more he
knows the less he trusts you. I don't wonder."

"He hasn't anything on me."

But Anna had come to the limit of her patience with her father at last.

"What's the matter with you?" she demanded angrily one night, when
Herman had sat with his pipe in his mouth, and had refused her
permission to go to the moving-pictures with another girl. "Do you think
I'm going on forever like this, without a chance to play? I'm sick of
it. That's all."

"You vill not run around with the girls on this hi