o," Fyfe responded. "I never have gone into any details of my
business with you. No reason why you shouldn't know what limits there
are to our income. You never happened to express any curiosity before.
Operating as I did up till lately, the business netted anywhere from
twelve to fifteen thousand a year. I'll double that this season. In
fact, with the amount of standing timber I control, I could make it
fifty thousand a year by expanding and speeding things up. I guess you
needn't worry about an extra servant or two."

So, apart from voluntary service on behalf of Jack Junior, she was free
as of old to order her days as she pleased. Yet that small morsel of
humanity demanded much of her time, because she released through the
maternal floodgates a part of that passionate longing to bestow love
where her heart willed. Sometimes she took issue with herself over that
wayward tendency. By all the rules of the game, she should have loved
her husband. He was like a rock, solid, enduring, patient, kind, and
generous. He stood to her in the most intimate relation that can exist
between a man and a woman. But she never fooled herself; she never had
so far as Jack Fyfe was concerned. She liked him, but that was all. He
was good to her, and she was grateful.

Sometimes she had a dim sense that under his easy-going exterior lurked
a capacity for tremendously passionate outbreak. If she had been
compelled to modify her first impression of him as an arrogant, dominant
sort of character, scarcely less rough than the brown firs out of which
he was hewing a fortune, she knew likewise that she had never seen
anything but the sunny side of him. He still puzzled her a little at
times; there were odd flashes of depths she could not see into, a
quality of unexpectedness in things he would do and say. Even so,
granting that in him was embodied so much that other men she knew
lacked, she did not love him; there were indeed times when she almost
resented him.

Why, she could not perhaps have put into words. It seemed too fantastic
for sober summing-up, when she tried. But lurking always in the
background of her thoughts was the ghost of an unrealized dream, a
nebulous vision which once served to thrill her in secret. It could
never be anything but a vision, she believed now, and believing,
regretted. The cold facts of her existence couldn't be daydreamed away.
She was married, and marriage put a full stop to the potential
adventuring of yout