n their chance to rise in the ranks; ought they to
be condemned to tread in the same path as their fathers?"

"I would have those little paths which intersect every unoccupied
field in this locality worn by the feet of these men and their
children after them unto the third and fourth generation," said
Risley. "If not, where is our skilled labor?"

"Oh, Mr. Risley," said Mrs. Lloyd, anxiously, "you wouldn't want all
those dear little children to work as hard as their fathers, and not
do any better, would you?"

"If they don't, who is going to make our shoes, dear Mrs. Lloyd?"
asked Risley.

Mrs. Lloyd and the school-master stared at him, and Lloyd laughed
his low, almost mirthless laugh.

"Don't you know, Edward," he said, "that Mr. Risley is not in
earnest, and speaks with the deadly intent of an anarchist with a
bomb in his bag? He is the most out-and-out radical in the country.
If there were a strike, and I did not yield to the demands of the
oppressed, and imported foreign labor, I don't know that my life
would be safe from him."

"Then you do approve of a higher education?" asked the
school-master, while Mrs. Lloyd stared from one to the other in
bewilderment.

"Yes, if we and our posterity have to go barefoot," said Risley,
laughing out with a sudden undertone of seriousness.

"I suppose everybody could get accustomed to going barefoot after a
while," said Mrs. Lloyd. "Do you suppose that dear little thing was
barefooted when she ran away, Cynthia?"

Risley answered as if he had been addressed. "I can vouch for the
fact that she was not, Mrs. Lloyd," he said. "They would sooner have
walked on red-hot ploughshares themselves than let her."

"Her father is getting quite an old man," Norman Lloyd said, with no
apparent relevancy, as if he were talking to himself.

All the time Cynthia Lennox had been quietly sitting at the head of
the table. When the rest of the company had gone, and she and Risley
were alone, seated in the drawing-room before the parlor fire, for
it was a chilly day, she turned her fair, worn face towards him on
the crimson velvet of her chair. "Do you know why I did not speak
and tell them where the child was that time?" she asked.

"Because of your own good sense?"

"No; because of you."

He looked at her adoringly. She was older than he, her beauty rather
recorded than still evident on her face; she had been to him from
the first like a fair, forbidden flower behind a wall of
p