“This is too absurd!” said Merle, grimly.

Harvey D. hesitated, then smiled, his alarm vanishing.

“Of course I was absurd,” he admitted, contritely.  “I know you must have kept on the rugs.”

“Oh, oh!” Again came the dry, bitter laugh of Merle.

“Say,” broke in Sharon, “you want to take a good long look at the next workingman you see.”

Merle swept him with a glance of scorn.  He stepped into the waiting car.

“I could no longer brook this spirit of intolerance, but I’m taking nothing except the clothes I’m wearing,” he reminded Harvey D.  “I go to my comrades barehanded.”  He adjusted the knot of crimson at his white throat.  “But they will not be barehanded long, remember that!”

Nathan Marwick started the car along the driveway.  Merle was seen to order a halt.

“Of course, for a time, at least, I shall keep the New York apartment.  My address will be the same.”

The car went on.

“Did that father know his own flesh and blood—­I ask you?” demanded Sharon.

“Dear me, dear me!” sighed Harvey D.

“Poor young thing!” said Gideon.

Merle, on his way to the train, thought of his hat.  He had not been able to feel confidence in that hat.  There was a trimness about it, an assertive glamour, an air of success, that should not stamp one of the oppressed.  He had gone to the purchase of it with vague notions that a labouring man, at least while actually labouring, wears a square cap of paper which he has made himself.  So he was crowned in all cartoons.  But, of course, this paper thing would not do for street wear, and the hat he now wore was the least wealth-suggesting he had been able to find.  He now decided that a cap would be better.  He seemed to remember that the toiling masses wore a lot of caps.

CHAPTER XVIII

A week later one of the New York evening papers printed an inspiring view of Merle Dalton Whipple in what was said to be the rough garb of the workingman.  He stanchly fronted the world in a corduroy suit and high-laced boots, a handkerchief knotted at his throat above a flannel shirt, and a somewhat proletarian cap set upon his well-posed head.  The caption ran:  “Young Millionaire Socialist Leaves Life of Luxury to be Simple Toiler.”

A copy of this enterprising sheet, addressed in an unknown hand, arrived at the Whipple New Place, to further distress the bereft family.  Only Sharon Whipple was not distressed.  He remarked that the toiler was not so simple as some people might think, and he urged that an inquiry be set on foot to discover the precise nature of the toil now being engaged in by this recruit to the ranks of labour.  He added that he himself would be glad to pay ninety dollars a month and board to any toiler worth his salt, because Juliana was now his only reliable helper, and it did seem as if she would never learn to run a tractor, she having no gift for machinery.  If Merle Whipple was bent on toil, why should he not come to the Home Farm, where plenty of it could be had for the asking?