or think,
concerning her and her fortunes. Yet there unmistakably was the Van Dorn
set to her pretty head and a Van Dorn gesture in her gay hands that had
come down from at least four generations in family tradition. And he had
no right even to be offended when she would merge that Van Dorn blood
with the miserable Adams heredity. His impotence in the situation
baffled him, and angered him. The law was final to his mind; but it did
not satisfy his wrathful questioning heart. For in his heart, he
realized that denial was not escape from the responsibility he had
renounced when he tripped down the steps of their home and left Lila
pleading for him in her mother's arms. He bit his ragged cigar and
cursed his God, while the young man with Tom Van Dorn thought, "Well,
what a dour old Turk he is!"

The hammering and sawing, which drowned the voices of the young people
under the tree, came from the new bathing pavilion near by. Grant Adams
was working on a two days' job putting up the pavilion for the summer.
He was out of Van Dorn's view, facing another angle of the long
three-faced veranda. Grant saw Kenyon lying upon the turf, slim and
graceful and with the beauty of youth radiating from him, and Grant
wondered, as he worked, why his son should be there playing among the
hills, while the sons of other men, making much more money than he--much
more money indeed than many of the others who flitted over the
green--should toil in the fumes of South Harvey and in the great
industrial Valley through long hard hours of work, that sapped their
heads and hearts by its monotony of motion, and lack of purpose. As he
gazed at the lovers, their love did not stick in his consciousness--even
if he realized it. Their presence under the elm tree at midday rose as a
problem which deepened a furrow here and there in his seamed face and he
hammered and sawed away with a will, working out in his muscles the
satisfaction which his mind could not bring him.

As the two fathers from different vistas looked upon their children,
Kenyon and Lila beneath the elm tree were shyly toying with vagrant
dreams that trailed across their hearts. He was looking up at her and
saying:

"Lila--who are we--you and I? I have been gazing at you three minutes
while you were talking, and I see some one quite different from the you
I knew before. Looking up at you, instead of down at you, is like
transposing you. You are strangely new in this other key."

The girl