llen woman and drove me
off into the wilderness.

Duncan asked me to-day if I'd motor up to the mines with him for the
week-end. I had to tell him that I'd promised to take Elmer and
Pauline Augusta to hear Kathleen Parlow and that it wouldn't seem
quite fair to break my word. Duncan said that I was the best judge of
that. Then he slammed a drawer shut and asked me, in his newer manner,
how long I intended to pull this iceberg stuff. "For I can't see," he
concluded after calling out for Tokudo to bring his hat and coat,
"that I'm getting such a hell of a lot out of this arrangement!"

I asked him, as quietly as I could, what he expected of me. But I
could feel my heart pounding quick against my ribs. I am not, and
never pretended to be, any stained-glass saint. And there were a few
things I felt it was about time to unload. But Tokudo cat-footed back
with the coat, and I could hear Lossie's clear laugh as she came in
through the front door with the returning Dinkie, and some inner voice
warned me to hold my peace. So Duncan and I merely stood there staring
at each other, for a moment or two, across an abysmal and unbridgeable
gulf of silence. Then he strode out to his car without as much as a
howdy-do to the startled and slightly mystified Lossie.

_Monday the Eighteenth_

I have just learned that we were blackballed from the Country Club. My
husband, at least, has met with that experience.

It was Lois who let the cat out of the bag. She wasn't clear on all
the details, but it was that old has-been of a Goodhue who was at the
bottom of it all, according to the lady known as Slinkie. Duncan and
he had clashed, from the first. Then Duncan had bought up his paper,
and compelled him to mortgage his home. It was because of something to
do with the Barcona Mines directorate, Lois thought, that Captain
Goodhue had had Duncan blackballed when he applied for membership in
the Country Club, the Captain being vice-president of the original
holding company. Lois laughed none too pleasantly when she added that
her Charley and my Duncan had joined hands to go after the old man's
scalp. And they had got it. They turned him inside out, before they
got through with him. They took his fore-lock and his teepee and his
last string of wampum. And the old snob, of course, would never
forgive them.

... They took his fore-lock, and his teepee ... And it was Chaddie
McKail and her bairns who were now housing warm in that captur