to decide on a home, and he developed unexpected opposition
to living at Redding in the Orde homestead.

"No, I've been thinking about it," he told Grandma Orde. "A young couple
should start out on their own responsibility. I know you'd be glad to
have us, but I think it's better the other way. Besides, I must be at
Monrovia a good deal of the time, and I want Carroll with me. She can
make you a good long visit in the spring, when I have to go up river."

To this Grandma Orde, being a wise old lady, had to nod her assent,
although she would much have liked her son near her.

At Monrovia, then, they took up their quarters. Carroll soon became
acquainted with the life of the place. Monrovia, like most towns of its
sort and size, consisted of an upper stratum of mill owners and lumber
operators, possessed of considerable wealth, some cultivation,
and definite social ideas; a gawky, countrified, middle estate of
storekeepers, catering both to the farm and local trade and the lumber
mill operatives, generally of Holland extraction, who dwelt in simple
unpainted board shanties. The class first mentioned comprised a small
coterie, among whom Carroll soon found two or three congenials--Edith
Fuller, wife of the young cashier in the bank; Valerie Cathcart, whose
husband had been killed in the Civil War; Clara Taylor, wife of the
leading young lawyer of the village; and, strangely enough, Mina
Heinzman, the sixteen-year-old daughter of old Heinzman, the lumberman.
Nothing was more indicative of the absolute divorce of business and
social life than the unbroken evenness of Carroll's friendship for the
younger girl. Though later the old German and Orde locked in serious
struggle on the river, they continued to meet socially quite as usual;
and the daughter of one and the wife of the other never suspected
anything out of the ordinary. This impersonality of struggle has always
been characteristic of the pioneer business man's good-nature.

Newmark received the news of his partner's sudden marriage without
evincing any surprise, but with a sardonic gleam in one corner of his
eye. He called promptly, conversed politely for a half hour, and then
took his leave.

"How do you like him?" asked Orde, when he had gone.

"He looks like a very shrewd man," replied Carroll, picking her words
for fear of saying the wrong thing.

Orde laughed.

"You don't like him," he stated.

"I don't dislike him," said Carroll. "I've not a thing agai