Her eyes dropped from his face, and her hands began to move restlessly over the folds of her skirt. "I've had a lot to think about--to look at the future in a new way. There's no hope now of my leaving this place, thanks to uncle!" "Oh!" she exclaimed in a low voice. The coldness of her tone was not lost upon the man. He saw quickly that it would not do to admit to her that he even contemplated contesting his uncle's will. She was not sympathetic in the manner of Mrs. Phillips! "Of course," he hastened to add magnanimously, "uncle had a perfect right to do as he liked. It was his money. But what could he have had against me?" "Why, nothing, I am sure!" she answered quickly. "It looks, though, as if he had!" "Why?" she stammered, trying to adjust herself to his level of thought. "Perhaps he thought it was better so--better for you," she suggested gently. "He used to say that the men of his time had more in their lives than men have nowadays, because they had to rely on themselves to make all the fight from the beginning. Nowadays so many young men inherit capital and position. He thought there were two great gifts in life,--health and education. When a man had those, he could go out to meet the future bravely without any other help." "Yes, I have heard him say all that," he hastened to admit. "But the world isn't running on just the same lines it was when uncle Powers was working at the forge. It's a longer road up these days." "Is it?" the girl asked vaguely. Then they were silent once more. There was nothing of reproof in her words, yet he felt keenly the difference in the atmosphere of this faded little Maple Street house from the world he had been living in of late. He had told himself for the last week that now he could not marry this woman, that a great and perfectly obvious barrier had been raised between them by his disinheritance. It had all been so clear to him from the first that he had not questioned the idea. This sacrifice of his love seemed to him the greatest that his uncle had forced upon him, and as the days had gone by he had thought incessantly how he might avoid it, how he might obtain some part at least of that vanishing fortune. This very evening he had had more talk about the will with the clever Mrs. Phillips, and he had come away from her almost resolved to contest the instrument. On the morrow he would notify his cousin, consult a lawyer, and take the preliminary steps. On the very heels of that decision there had come an irresistible desire to see this other woman,--the longing for the antithesis which so often besets the uncertain human will. Nothing was more unlike Mrs. Phillips in his horizon than this direct, inexperienced girl, full of pure enthusiasms!