ctor,--go on." And in a moment the buggy
was spinning up the hill toward the town.

Thus it was that every day, rain or shine, until the day of her wedding,
Laura Nesbit drove her dog cart to the Adamses before the men went to
their work and took little Kenyon home with her and brought him back in
the evening. And always she took him from the arms of Grant--Grant,
red-headed, freckled, blue-eyed, who was hardening into manhood and
premature maturity so fast that he did not realize the change that it
made in his face. It grew set, but not hard, a woman's tenderness crept
into the features, and with that tenderness came at times a look of
petulant impatience. It was a sad face--a sadly fanatic face--yet one
that lighted with human feeling under a smile.

Little by little, meeting daily--often meeting morning and evening,
Grant and Laura established a homely, wholesome, comfortable relation.

One evening while Laura was waiting for Tom Van Dorn and Grant was
waiting for Kenyon she and Grant sitting upon the veranda steps of the
Nesbit home, looked into the serene, wide lawn that topped the hill
above the quiet town. They could look across the white and green of the
trees and houses, across the prosperous, solid, red roofs of the stone
and brick stores and offices on Market Street, into the black smudge of
smoke and the gray, unpainted, sprawling rows of ill-kept tenements
around the coal mines, that was South Harvey. They could see even then
the sky stains far down the Wahoo Valley, where the villages of Foley
and Magnus rose and duplicated the ugliness of South Harvey.

The drift of the conversation was personal. The thoughts of youth are
largely personal. The universe is measured by one's own thumb in the
twenties. "Funny, isn't it," said Grant, playing with a honeysuckle vine
that climbed the post beside him, "I guess I'm the only one of the old
crowd who is outlawed in overalls. There's Freddie Kollander and Nate
Perry and cousin Morty and little Joe Calvin, all up town counterjumping
or working in offices. The girls all getting married." He paused. "But
as far as that goes I'm making more money than any of the fellows!" He
paused again a moment and added as he gazed moodily into the pillars of
smoke rising above South Harvey, "Gee, but I'll miss you when you're
gone--"

The girl's silvery laugh greeted his words. "Now, Grant," she said,
"where do you think I'm going? Why, Tom and I will be only a block from
here-