found myself beginning, “I have rather had a notion that her father might come on, and take the enterprise off our hands,” though, to tell the truth, I had never imagined such a thing, which came into my head at that moment through an association with the thought of parents. “Have you any idea what sort of man he is?” asked Kendricks. “Oh, some little local magnate, president of the village and president of the village bank; I fancy the chief figure in the place, but probably as ignorant of our world as a Cherokee.” “Well, I don’t know,” said the young fellow. “Do you think that follows because he doesn’t live in it?” I could see that he did not quite like what I had said. “I suppose ours is rather a small world.” “The smallest of all worlds,” I answered. “And in the eyes of Papa Gage, if they could once be focused upon it, our world would shrivel to an atom.” “Do you think,” he asked, with a manifest anxiety, “that it would in hers?” “No; she is not the American people, and her father is, as I fancy him. I make out from the vague hints that Brother Deering (as Fulkerson would call him) dropped when he talked about him that Papa Gage is a shrewd, practical, home-keeping business man, with an eye single to the main chance, lavish, but not generous, Philistine to the backbone, blindly devoted to his daughter, and contemptuous of all the myriad mysteries of civilisation that he doesn’t understand. I don’t know why I should be authorised to imagine him personally long and lank, with possibly a tobacco habit of some sort. His natural history, upon no better authority, is that of a hard-headed farmer, who found out that farming could never be more than a livelihood, and came into the village, and began to lend money, and get gain, till he was in a position to help found the De Witt Point National Bank, and then, by weight of his moneyed solidity, imposed himself upon the free and independent voters of the village—a majority of them under mortgage to him—and became its president. It isn’t a pleasant type, but it’s ideally American.” “Yes,” said Kendricks ruefully. “But his daughter,” I continued, “is probably altogether different. There is something fine about her—really fine. Our world wouldn’t shrivel in her eye; it would probably swell up and fill the universe,” I added by an impulse that came from nowhere irresistibly upon me: “that is, if she could see _you_ in it.” “What do you mean?” he asked with a start. “Oh, now I must tell you what I mean,” I said desperately. “It’s you that have complicated this case so dreadfully for us. Can’t you think why?” “No, I can’t,” he said; but he had to say that. His fine, sensitive face flamed at once so fire-red that it could only turn pale for a change when I plunged on: “I’m afraid we’ve trifled with her happiness”; and this formulation of the case disgusted me so much that I laughed wildly, and added, “unless we’ve trifled with yours, too.”