For weeks the town talked of nothing else; and as Carl McGregor listened to these stories his regrets at not being numbered among Davis and Coulter's elect waxed keener and keener. One did not enjoy being left out of a function of such magnitude, a party to which everybody else was going. Not only did it make you feel lonely and stranded but it mortified you to be obliged to own you were not of the happy band included in so magnificent a celebration. "Now if you'd only have let me take a job at the mills as I wanted to, Ma, we might have been going to Mr. Coulter's party along with the rest of the world," Carl bemoaned. "I always told you I ought to go into those mills the way the other fellows do. But you wouldn't hear to it. Now see what's come of it. We are left high and dry. I'll bet we are the only people in Baileyville who are not invited to that party. Everybody is to be there. If even one member of a family works at the mill that lets in the bunch." "Like the garden parties great families used to give their tenants in the old country," Mrs. McGregor murmured reminiscently. "I don't know about the old country," replied Carl ungraciously, "but that is what Mr. Coulter is going to do--ask whole families. Gee, but it makes me sore!" "If your father had lived we would have been there," said the boy's mother sadly. "Your father used to be very good friends with old Mr. Coulter and he would have seen to it that none of this household was left out. But Mr. John we never knew. He was always away studying--first at school, then at college, and then in Europe. Later he started in to be a lawyer in New York and but for the war and his father's death he'd most likely be doing that now. But when the old gentleman died Mr. John gave up everything else and came home to take his place in the firm as his father had wished he should. Folks say that in spite of not caring much for the mills at first he has persisted at his job until he has become genuinely interested in them. I honor him for it, too, for a business life wasn't his real choice. Of course being away so much as he has he is little known among the mill people yet; but evidently he means to settle down here and is anxious to get better acquainted. This wedding party shows that." "Well, there are some he won't get acquainted with," lamented Carl. "If you mean us I reckon he can worry along without," Mrs. McGregor retorted, with a twinkle in her eye. "He's managed to up to now." "We're just as good as anybody else," her son blazed. "Undoubtedly we are," was the good-humored answer. "Nevertheless we won't be missed in a crowd like that." "Don't you _want_ to go to the party, Ma?"