him go to his father.

In his office all day long there was Anna, so yielding, so surely his to
take if he wished. Already he knew that things there must either end or
go forward. Human emotions do not stand still; they either advance or go
back, and every impulse of his virile young body was urging him on.

He made at last an almost frenzied appeal to Marion to marry him at
once, but she refused flatly.

"I'm not going to ruin you," she said. "If you can't bring your people
round, we'll just have to wait."

"They'd be all right, once it is done."

"Not if I know your father! Oh, he'd be all right--in ten years or so.
But what about the next two or three? We'd have to live, wouldn't we?"

He lay awake most of the night thinking things over. Did she really care
for him, as Anna cared, for instance? She was always talking about their
having to live. If they couldn't manage on his salary for a while, then
it was because Marion did not care enough to try.

For the first time he began to question Marion's feeling for him. She
had been rather patronizing him lately. He had overheard her, once,
speaking of him as a nice kid, and it rankled. In sheer assertion of his
manhood he met Anna Klein outside the mill at the noon hour, the next
day, and took her for a little ride in his car. After that he repeatedly
did the same thing, choosing infrequented streets and roads, dining with
her sometimes at a quiet hotel out on the Freeland road.

"How do you get away with this to your father?" he asked her once.

"Tell him you're getting ready to move out to the new plant, and we're
working. He's not round much in the evenings now. He's at meetings, or
swilling beer at Gus's saloon. They're a bad lot, Graham, that crowd at
Gus's."

"How do you mean, bad?"

"Well, they're Germans, for one thing, the sort that shouts about the
Fatherland. They make me sick."

"Let's forget them, honey," said Graham, and reaching under the
table-cloth, caught and held one of her hands.

He was beginning to look at things with the twisted vision of Marion's
friends. He intended only to flirt a little with Anna Klein, but he
considered that he was extremely virtuous and, perhaps, a bit of a fool
for letting things go at that. Once, indeed, Tommy Hale happened on them
in a road-house, sitting very quietly with a glass of beer before Graham
and a lemonade in front of Anna, and had winked at him as though he had
received him into the brotherhood o