et they had signally failed to
convince him or to induce him to subscribe a dollar. The girl had
succeeded in less than an hour, and sold him exactly the amount he
should have bought.

The mill subscription was a powerful leverage with which to pry money
from other reluctant ones. Stacks, Sellem & Stacks, the big department
store heretofore resisting all appeals, bought from Mary Louise bonds
to the amount of twenty-five thousand; the Denis Hardware Company took
ten thousand. Then Mary Louise met her first serious rebuff. She went
into Silas Herring's wholesale grocery establishment and told Mr.
Herring she wanted to sell him bonds.

"This is outrageous!" cried Herring indignantly. "When the men can't
rob us, or force us to back England in her selfish schemes, they set
girls on us to wheedle us out of money we have honestly earned. This
hold-up game won't work, I assure you, and I advise you to get into
more respectable business. My money is mine; it doesn't belong to the
Allies, and they won't get a cent of it." He was getting more angry as
he proceeded in his harangue. "Moreover," he continued, "our weak
administration can't use me to help it out of the hole it has foolishly
stumbled into, or make America the cat's-paw to pull British chestnuts
out of the fire. You ought to be ashamed, Miss Burrows, to lend
yourself to such unpatriotic methods of bulldozing honest citizens!"

Mary Louise was distressed, but undaunted. The man was monstrously
wrong, and she knew it. Sitting in Mr. Herring's private office at the
time were Professor John Dyer, the superintendent of Dorfield's
schools, and the Hon. Andrew Duncan, a leading politician, a former
representative and now one of the county supervisors. The girl looked
at Professor Dyer, whom she knew slightly, and said pleadingly:

"Won't you defend our administration and our country, Mr. Dyer?"

He smiled deprecatingly but did not speak. He was a tall, lean man,
quite round-shouldered and of studious appearance. He wore double
eyeglasses, underneath which his eyes were somewhat watery. The smile
upon his thin features was a stationary one, not as if assumed, but
molded with the features and lacking geniality.

It was the Hon. Andrew Duncan who answered the Liberty Girl.

"The difference between Mr. Herring and eighty percent of the American
people," said he in stilted, pompous tones, "is that our friend Herring
unwisely voices his protest, while the others merely think