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 sorry and ashamed more than he had been before but also he experienced, more than before, the strange, defiant pangs of exaltation which had followed his first meeting with Fidelia Netley. He did not will them; they came.

They came with the night cold off the lake and with the sight of the stars above the ice when he approached Alice's home. They went with sight of the lighted windows of the big, stone mansion between the boulevard and the shore.

It still surprised Dave Herrick to realize that this was a house of friends of his, that he not only could enter it but that he was a privileged person within. He had been brought up in suspicion of the rich.

There was no one in Itanaca who really was rich; and there was no house either in Itanaca or in any of the larger towns of the county which could be compared with this mansion in which Alice lived. Obviously her father was a rich man; and that had meant to Dave Herrick that he was, therefore, almost certainly a Godless man. He might be a hypocrite, making a show of prayer and right-doing; but if he was rich, something must be wrong with him.

Dave had been taught Christ's own word to prove that: "Verily I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

"Woe unto you that are rich!" the Lord had cried out; and his apostle warned: "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you."

Dave was eighteen years old, and he had been only