Sometimes 'Thusia would run across to visit a few minutes with Amy Manning, and sometimes Amy--her needlework gathered in her apron--would come running across to sit awhile with 'Thusia. The two were very fond. 'Thusia had reached the age when she was always humorously complaining about having to let out the seams of her last year's dresses, and Amy was hardly more than a girl, but propinquity or some contrast or similarity of disposition had made them the best of friends. Perhaps 'Thusia had never lost all her girlish qualities, and certainly Amy had been something of a woman even as a child. For all the years that divided them they were more nearly of an age than many who reckoned from the same birth year. Such friendships are far from rare and are often the best and most lasting. David had seen Amy grow; had seen her fall bumping--a little ball of white--down the Manning porch steps and had heard (and still heard) the low-voiced and long lasting farewells she and Mack exchanged at the Mannings' gate, young love making the most of itself, and making a twenty-four hour tragedy out of a parting. The girl had been tall at fourteen and even then had certain womanly gestures and manners. She had always been a sweet girl, frank, gentle, even-tem-pered, with clear eyes showing she had a good brain back of their blue. She was always, as the saying is in Riverbank, “interested in church.” Her religion was something real and vital. She accepted her faith in full and lived it, not bothering with the artificial agonies of soul that some youngsters find necessary. From a girl of this kind she had grown into a young woman, calm, clean, sterling. She had a healthy love of pleasure in any of the unforbidden forms, and, before Mack Graham slipped a ring on her finger, she liked to have half a dozen young whipper-snappers showing attention, quite like any other girl. She even liked, after that, to see that two or three of the whipper-snappers were jealous of Mack. Mack was never jealous and could not be. He was one of the laughing, conquering hero kind. Amy was his from the moment he decided she was the finest girl in the world; he never considered any rival worth a worry. In olden days he would have been a carefree, swashbuckling D'Artagnan sort of fellow, and this, in nose-to-grindstone Riverbank, made him a great favorite and it led him to consort with a set of young fellows of the gayer sort with whom he learned to crook his elbow over a bar and continue to crook it until the alcohol had tainted his blood and set up its imperative cry for more. When David took up the fight for Mack this alcohol yearning had become well intrenched, and the conquering hero trait in the young fellow's character made the fight doubly hard, for Mack--more than any man I have ever known--believed in himself and that he could “stop off short” whenever he really wished.