lay
the dust, but had made it impossible to walk through the grass or over the
fields; his pride made it impossible for him to go back to the house, and
so there was no place open to him except the hayloft, where he turned his
own gloomy thoughts over and reasoned out this new development. A day's
pouting, he was certain, would win his point; it would probably be all
right when he went back at supper time, but he saw difficulties ahead with
Elizabeth feeling that she had a right to an opinion regarding the
property.

"I shall let her see that I mean business all the same. I'm not going to
have her interfering in my work. Let her attend to her own, as a woman
ought to do," he concluded.

He did wish, however, that he had read the letter. Doctor Morgan had
referred to the letter also as being authority. He had an uncomfortable
feeling that if he ever saw that letter that he would have to ask again;
Elizabeth was a little less easy of late to manage than she had been that
first year; she could put a thing aside and not discuss it almost as well
as he could.

At that point John's mind flamed up against Luther Hansen. Elizabeth was
always quoting Luther. He was glad he had let her see just now that she
need not quote that common Swede to him any more. He didn't know a necktie
from a shoelace! Hugh might have asked him to witness the will, but Hugh
had seen fit to leave the money to them, all the same. Whatever else hurt,
the money was his, and he'd turn everything into cattle, and get rich, and
get out of this damned hole.

Elizabeth, in the house, was doing her own thinking. The conversation just
finished had indications. She saw that her husband had a definite policy
in regard to the management of the property, that he did not mean to let
her have any more to do with it than when it was all his own. A creeping
suspicion came to her that if she refused to consent to further mortgages
her husband might leave her. There had been a violence in his tones as
well as in his manner beyond any he had ever assumed toward her. Elizabeth
shrank in a heartsick way from the contest. If he would mortgage the one
eighty and then stop she would far rather have given away that much land
than to have the quarrel, but that she knew he would not do. She could not
for a moment think of giving up if she expected to have a roof over her
head that was unencumbered when she was old. Though half the property was
now hers by actual right, she wou