"I'll never marry a man who hasn't principles--and religion," she replied without a blush. "So I must be good and pious, as well as educated?" "You must be a man"--and her lips curved ironically--"and now you are just a boy." But I held her hand when I helped her from the buggy, and I believe she would have let me kiss her had I wanted to then. [Illustration: _Earning mighty little but my keep._] Father and mother took my expulsion from school very hard, as I expected. Father especially--who had begun to brag somewhat at the store about my being a lawyer and beating the judge out--was so bitter that I told him if he would give me fifty dollars I would go off somewhere and never trouble him again. "You ask me to give you fifty dollars to go to hell with!" he shouted out. "Put me in the store, then, and let me earn it. Give me the same money you give Will." But father didn't want me around the store for folks to see. So I had to go out to a farm once more, to a place that father was working on shares with a Swede. I spent the better part of two years on that farm, living with the old Swede, and earning mighty little but my keep. For father gave me a dollar now and then, but no regular wages. I could get sight of May only on a Sunday. She was teaching her first school in another county. Father and mother Rudge had never liked me: they looked higher for May than to marry a poor farm-hand, who had a bad name in the town. My brother Will, who was a quiet, church-going fellow, had learned his way to the Rudge place by this time, and the old people favored him. After a while I heard of a chance in a surveyor's office at Terre Haute, but old Sorrell, who had more business than any ten men in that part of the country, met the surveyor on the train, and when I reached the office there wasn't any job for me. That night, when I got back from Terre Haute, I told my folks that I was going to Chicago. The next day I asked my father again for some money. Mother answered for him:-- "Will don't ask us for money. It won't be fair to him." "So he's to have the store and my girl too," I said bitterly. "May Rudge isn't the girl to marry a young man who's wild." "I'll find that out for myself!" Always having had a pretty fair opinion of myself, I found it hard to be patient and earn good-will by my own deserts. So I said rather foolishly to father:-- "Will you give me a few dollars to start me with? I have earned it all right, and I am asking you for the last time." It was a kind of threat, and I am sorry enough for it now. I suspect he hadn't the money, for things were going badly with him. He answered pretty warmly that I should wait a long time before he gave me another dollar to throw away. I turned on my heel without a word to him or mother, and went out of the house with the resolve not to return.