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 CHAPTER VIII

Clara Butterworth, the daughter of Tom Butterworth, was eighteen years old she graduated from the town high school. Until the summer of her seventeenth year, she was a tall, strong, hard-muscled girl, shy in the presence of strangers and bold with people she knew well. Her eyes were extraordinarily gentle.

The Butterworth house on Medina Road stood back of an apple orchard and there was a second orchard beside the house. The Medina Road ran south from Bidwell and climbed gradually upward toward a country of low hills, and from the side porch of the Butterworth house the view was magnificent. The house itself was a large brick affair with a cupola on top and was considered at that time the most pretentious place in the county.

Behind the house were several great barns for the horses and cattle. Most of Tom Butterworth's farm land lay north of Bidwell, and some of his fields were five miles from his home; but as he did not himself work the land it did not matter. The farms were rented to men who worked them on shares. Beside the business of farming Tom carried on other affairs. He owned two hundred acres of hillside land near his house and, with the exception of a few fields and a strip