our hands of me?"

Gower looked at him for a second. His face was a mask, devoid of
expression.

"You're a man grown," he said. "Your mother has expressed herself as she
might be expected to. I say nothing."

Norman walked to the door.

"I don't care a deuce of a lot what you say or what you don't say, nor
even what you think," he flung at them angrily, with his hand on the
knob. "I have my own row to hoe. I'm going to hoe it my own style. And
that's all there is to it. If you can't even wish me luck, why, you can
go to the devil!"

"Norman!" His mother lifted her voice in protesting horror. Gower
himself only smiled, a bit cynically. And Betty looked at the door which
closed upon her brother with a wistful sort of astonishment.

Gower first found occasion for speech.

"While we are on the subject of intimate family affairs, Bessie," he
addressed his wife casually, "I may as well say that I shall have to
call on you for some funds--about thirty thousand dollars. Forty
thousand would be better."

Mrs. Gower stiffened to attention. She regarded her husband with an air
of complete disapproval, slightly tinctured with surprise.

"Oh," she said, "really?"

"I shall need that much properly to undertake this season's operations,"
he stated calmly, almost indifferently.

"Really?" she repeated. "Are you in difficulties again?"

"Again?" he echoed. "It is fifteen years since I was in a corner where I
needed any of your money."

"It seems quite recent to me," Mrs. Gower observed stiffly.

"Am I to understand from that that you don't care to advance me whatever
sum I require?" he asked gently.

"I don't see why I should," Mrs. Gower replied after a second's
reflection, "even if I were quite able to do so. This place costs
something to keep up. I can't very well manage on less than two thousand
a month. And Betty and I must be clothed. You haven't contributed much
recently, Horace."

"No? I had the impression that I had been contributing pretty freely for
thirty years," Gower returned dryly. "I paid the bills up to December.
Last season wasn't a particularly good one--for me."

"That was chiefly due to your own mismanagement, I should say," Mrs.
Gower commented tartly. "Putting the whole cannery burden on Norman when
the poor boy had absolutely no experience. Really, you must have
mismanaged dreadfully. I heard only the other day that the Robbin-Steele
plants did better last season than they ever did. I'm sure