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 "Sit down, boy," Alice's father invited, pleasantly. "Alice won't be here right away."

"She's out?"

"Oh, no; she's in her room. You've been having a little difficulty between you, I take it."

"Yes, sir," Dave admitted.

"Sit down," Mr. Sothron repeated; and this time Dave obeyed.

His nervousness increased but he was used to feeling nervous in this house and he had had ways of combating it. At first he had done it by summoning to himself a feeling of scorn for the trappings of wealth which made him uncomfortable. But he could not continue feeling this; for the more familiar he became with these people, the more ridiculous became his previous teachings in regard to the rich. If woe was to come to Mr. Sothron, because he had left his father's farm in New York state, put himself through Cornell, and then invented and manufactured electrical appliances which everybody wanted, Dave would like to know the justice of it. He thought Mr. Sothron about as good and useful a citizen as one could find; and the idea of Mr. Sothron having to howl and weep, was simply absurd. He wouldn't do it. So Dave's defense of his early ideas soon left him. He became merely a poor young man in the embarrassing position of a suitor in a house of wealth. Every one here always had been kind to him; they were well-bred people and besides they made him feel that they honestly liked him, but not as a husband for Alice.

For the first time, Dave felt in Alice's father an absence of that opposition to-night.