“Great Scott! Can’t a man be just ordinarily chummy with a girl he’s known all his life without having the gossips of a country-town tie a tin can to him?”

“With a number of them, yes; but with one, no.”

“Bosh!” said David.

“No, it isn’t ‘bosh.’ You’ve specialized on Judith; I’ve seen it myself. Candidly, David,[50] I’ve tried to shut my eyes to it, partly because I hoped it might die out. Judith’s a good girl, and in her own class she is the prettiest thing that was ever turned loose in a world of more or less squashy young men. But I can’t seem to see her calling herself Mrs. Vallory.”

[50]

“You needn’t try.”

Oswald’s eyebrows went up. “She has turned you down?”

“Bert, if this place wasn’t so public I should blow up! Good Lord, man! there has never been anything sentimental between Judith and me!—nothing on top of earth more than a bit of jolly good-comradeship!”

Being already up, Oswald’s eyebrows stayed in that position.

“On your part, perhaps; but how about Judith? Listen, David: within the past month I’ve heard half a dozen times that you and Judith were to be married as soon as you got yourself relocated in some more habitable place than a Florida swamp. You may howl all you want to about country-town gossip, but——”

This time David Vallory interrupted with a twist of the square jaw that took Oswald swiftly back to a day long remembered in Middleboro school annals when David had plunged, head[51] down, into battle with the leader of the “factory gang” and had for all time vindicated the superiority of “town-side” brain over mere brawn.

[51]

“Drop it, Herbert,” he said quietly; and then: “Let’s get back on the main track again. You were saying that the town expected me to come back and follow in Dad’s footsteps. There’s nothing doing. In another way, I’m as incompetent as he is. Money-handling doesn’t appeal to me; it never has appealed to me. I’d rather go out as a transit-man on some building job worth while than to be the president of the biggest bank in the State. It’s all in the way a man happens to be built.”

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