homes. They had invested and re-invested their money; they had given
their children advantages, according to their lights. Now, in their
early fifties, they were a power in the town, and they felt for it a
genuine affection and pride, a loyalty that was unquestioning and
sincere. In the kindly Western fashion these two were now accorded
titles; Cyrus, who had served in the Civil War, was "Colonel Frost,"
and to Graham, who had been a lawyer, was given the titular dignity
of being "Judge Parker."

Malcolm Monroe kept pace with neither his old associates nor with
the times. His investments were timid and conservative, his faith in
the town that had been named for his father frequently wavered. He
was in everything a reactionary, refusing to see that neither the
sheep of the old Spanish settlers nor the gold of the early pioneers
meant so much to this fragrant, sun-washed table land as did wheat
and grapes and apple trees. Monroe came to laugh at "old Monroe's"
pigheadedness. He fought the town on every question for
improvements, as it came up. The bill for pavements, the bill for
sewerage, the bill for street lights, the high school bill, found in
him an enemy as the years went by. He denounced these innovations
bitterly. When the level of Main Street was raised four feet, "old
Monroe" almost went out of his senses, and the home site, gloomily
shut in now by immense trees, and a whole block square, was left
four feet below the street level, so that there must be built three
or four wooden steps at all the gates. The Monroe girls resented
this peculiarity of their home, but never said so to their father.

Rose Ransome, the pretty, neat little daughter of a pretty, neat
little widow, was cultivated eagerly by the Monroes, and patronized
kindly by the Frost and Parker girls. She had lived all of her