was over."

"Leaving us free," he commented, "to go back to our own."

"You can go back to the farm, anyhow," she said. "I asked Doctor Darby,
especially, and he said so. He wants me to go along with you and take
Aunt Lucile. Just for a week or so. Is there any sort of place with a
roof over it where we could stay?"

He said, "I guess that could be managed." But his tone was so absent and
somber that she looked at him in sharp concern.

"You didn't mean that the farm was your nightmare, did you?" she asked.
"Has something gone terribly wrong out there?"

"Things have gone just the way I suppose anybody but a fool would have
known they would. Not worse than that, I guess."

He got up then and went over to the sideboard, coming back with a
decanter of old brandy and a pair of big English glasses. She declined
hers as unobtrusively as possible, just with a word and a faint shake of
the head. But it was enough to make him look at her.

"You didn't drink anything at dinner, either, did you?" he asked.

She flushed as she said, "I don't think I'm drinking, at all, just now."

"Being an example to anybody?" he asked suspiciously.

She smiled at that and patted his hand. "Oh, no, my dear. I've enough to
do to be an example to myself. I liked the way it was out at the
Corbetts'. They've gone bone-dry. And,--oh, please don't think that I'm a
prig--I am a little better without it--just now, anyway. Tell me what's
gone wrong at the farm."

"This is wonderful stuff," he said, cupping the fragile glass in his two
hands and inhaling the bouquet from the precious liquor in the bottom of
it. "It's good for nightmares, at any rate." After a sip or two, he
attempted to answer her question.

"Oh, I suppose we'll come out all right, eventually. Of course, we've got
to. But I wish Martin Whitney had done one thing or the other; either
shown a little real confidence and enthusiasm in the thing or else
stepped on it and refused to lend father the money."

"Lend?" Mary asked. "Did he have to borrow it?"

He dealt rather impatiently with that question. "You don't keep sixty or
eighty thousand dollars lying around loose in a checking account," he
said. "Of course, he had to borrow it. But he borrowed it of Whitney,
worse luck--and Whitney being an old friend, pulls a long face over it
whenever we find we need a little more than the original figures showed.
That's enough to give any one cold feet right there.

"Graham's father is