Hugh first saw Clara Butterworth one day in July when she had been at home for a month. She came to his shop late one afternoon with her father and a man who had been employed to manage the new bicycle factory. The three got out of Tom's buggy and came into the shop to see Hugh's new invention, the hay-loading apparatus. Tom and the man named Alfred Buckley went to the rear of the shop, and Hugh was left alone with the woman. She was dressed in a light summer gown and her cheeks were flushed. Hugh stood by a bench near an open window and listened while she talked of how much the town had changed in the three years she had been away. “It is your doing, every one says that,” she declared. Clara had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to Hugh. She began asking questions regarding his work and what was to come of it. “When everything is done by machines, what are people to do?” she asked. She seemed to take it for granted that the inventor had thought deeply on the subject of industrial development, a subject on which Kate Chanceller had often talked during a whole evening. Having heard Hugh spoken of as one who had a great brain, she wanted to see the brain at work. Alfred Buckley came often to her father's house and wanted to marry Clara. In the evening the two men sat on the front porch of the farmhouse and talked of the town and the big things that were to be done there. They spoke of Hugh, and Buckley, an energetic, talkative fellow with a long jaw and restless gray eyes who had come from New York City, suggested schemes for using him. Clara gathered that there was a plan on foot to get control of Hugh's future inventions and thereby gain an advantage over Steve Hunter. The whole matter puzzled Clara. Alfred Buckley had asked her to marry him and she had put the matter off. The proposal had been a formal thing, not at all what she had expected from a man she was to take as a partner for life, but Clara was at the moment very seriously determined upon marriage. The New York man was at her father's house several evenings every week. She had never walked about with him nor had they in any way come close to each other. He seemed too much occupied with work to be personal and had proposed marriage by writing her a letter. Clara got the letter from the post-office and it upset her so that she felt she could not for a time go into the presence of any one she knew. “I am unworthy of you, but I want you to be my wife. I will work for you. I am new here and you do not know me very well. All I ask is the privilege of proving my merit. I want you to be my wife, but before I dare come and ask you to do me so great an honor I feel I must prove myself worthy,” the letter said.