Tisdale waited, watching her with his upward look from under contracted brows. "What else can you do?" he asked at last. "Your tract is too small to be handled by a syndicate, and now that the levels of the Columbia desert are to be brought under a big irrigation project, which means a nominal expense to the grower, your high pocket, unimproved, will hardly attract the single buyer. Will you, then, plat it in five-acre tracts for the Seattle market and invite the—interest of your friends?"
She drew erect; the danger signals flamed briefly in her eyes. "My friends can be dis-interested, Mr. Tisdale. It has only been through them, for a long time, I have been able to keep my hold."
"There's where you made your mistake at the start; in gaining that hold.
When you conformed to their standards, your own were overthrown."
"That is not true." She did not raise her voice any; it dropped rather to a minor note? but a tremor ran over her body, and her face for an instant betrayed how deep the shaft had struck. "And, always, when I have accepted a favor, I have given full measure in exchange. But there is an alternative you seem to have overlooked."
"I understand," he said slowly, and his color rose. "You may marry again."
Then he asked, without protest: "Is it Foster?"
On occasion, during that long drive through the mountains, he had felt the varying height and thickness of an invisible barrier, but never, until that moment, its chill. Then Marcia Feversham called her, and she turned to go down the deck. "I'm coming!" she answered and stopped to look back. "You need not trouble about Mr. Foster," she said. "He—is safe."
CHAPTER XVII
"ALL THESE THINGS WILL I GIVE THEE"
Frederic had suggested a rubber at auction bridge.
Elizabeth fixed another pillow under his shoulders and moved the card table to his satisfaction, then took a chair near the players and unfolded her crochet, while Tisdale, whose injured hand excluded him from the game, seated himself beside her. He asked whimsically if she was manufacturing a cloud like the one in the west where the sun had set; but she lacked her sister's ready repartee, and, arresting her needle long enough to glance at him and back to the woolly, peach-pink pile in her lap, answered seriously: "It's going to be a hug-me-tight."