leaves me in! People think you're coming. I promised to bring
you."

"Then you were too presumptuous," Louise said. "Now go. You're only
making a bad matter worse."

"See here, Louise----"

"You had my refusal and I've repeated it a dozen times," she
interrupted, indignantly. "Must I shut the door in your face to
silence you? And here's another car. Have some regard for my personal
feelings, sir."

Lee by now had lifted Imogene into his arms and started toward the
speakers.

"Be a good sport, Louise," Menocal pursued, in a tone intended to be
wheedling. "Run upstairs and put on a party dress while I wait for
you. You don't understand how much I want you to come along to this
dance." His words were a little thick and stumbling.

"Hush! Don't you see someone has come? You've been drinking; and
you're sickening to me."

"I don't care if someone is there! Let 'em hear, Louise. Let all the
world hear, let your father hear, let anybody hear! Because I love
you, and so you must come to the dance." Suddenly his tone changed to
an angry hiss. "You've been treating me like a cur, refusing to see me
or go with me, and not letting me come here. I came to-night! I've
stood for enough from you; you can't play me for a fool any longer.
And you're going to marry me, too."

Bryant perceived by the lamplight of the doorway that the fellow had
snatched her hand, that the two were struggling. Burdened with Imogene
as he was, Lee was helpless to enterfere. But he went hastily up the
steps toward them. Louise tugged herself free.

"Oh, you contemptible creature!" she cried, in a voice of quivering
passion. "It's only because you know father is out caring for stock
that you dare stay here to insult me." Then looking past Menocal, she
exclaimed, "Who is that?"

"I, Bryant," said Lee. "With Imogene. She's ill, she needs to be put
to bed. There was no time to ask your permission to bring her, but I
knew----"

"Of course! If this beast will stop making a scene and go!"

Charlie Menocal was pulling on his fur cap.

"So here's our swell-headed crook of an engineer butting in again,"
he sneered. "You better be hunting up your own chicken, or Gretzinger
will have her. Who y' say you got there?"

"Stand aside!"

Bryant's voice struck the other like the lash of a whip, and the
half-drunken youth instinctively fell back a pace, so that Lee could
pass with his charge into the house. But as Louise was about to follow
Menocal seized h