“Expected it must be something about a cross,” grumbled Macon Hammerly. “Red Cross or what not, it will be the double-cross for you if you don’t look out. You’ve nothing in common, Frank, with that dogfennel.” “With _what_?” asked Barton, chuckling. “That’s a new one!” “A new name for that inconsequential, useless crowd that circle about Grandon Fuller’s gal? Huh! D’you know any better name for them? There ain’t nothing more useless and picayune along the road than dogfennel. That whole bunch isn’t worth the powder to blow it to Halifax!” “‘Dogfennel’,” and Barton still chuckled. “I don’t know but you are rather hard on our common may-weed. But I grant you that some of those people I met back there are quite as futile as the name implies. But Miss Fuller herself! She is a remarkably pretty girl.” The old man in the linen duster and the broad-brimmed hat was quite as emphatic as Barton expected him to be. “So’s dogfennel pretty--if you like weeds. I don’t want to see you mixing in with that crowd, Frank. How’s business?” “Better. Had to turn down a big order to-day, but I think we were justified in doing so.” “Huh! Who says so? You and Jim Mayberry?” growled Hammerly, who kept in quite close touch with the factory affairs. “Not altogether,” Barton smilingly replied. “We took the advice of Miss Clayton.” “Huh! You _did_?” Hammerly listened quietly to the manager’s explanation, commenting in his usual tart way, but with open satisfaction: “You do show some sense once in a while, Frank. She’s got a head on her, that Ethel Clayton. And you are right, I’ll bet a cooky! The Bogata people are due to bust inside of three months. Mark my words.” The two men separated at a corner and Barton strode on to his boarding house and the dinner which he knew would be dished up cold to him now. Mrs. Trevor played no table favorites in her ménage. The manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company was not happy. His reflections were tinged with a hue of disgust at his own equivocal situation. He knew he had good and sufficient reason for not enlisting the minute of the declaration that a state of war with Germany existed. The same reason had kept him at home when many of his comrades in the Guard had gone to the Mexican Border. He had been spending his strength and thought to one end since being placed in charge of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company. The war had struck the concern hard, cutting off or doubling the price of supplies without broadening the market for manufactured wares or increasing the profit on them.