Hope ebbed out of my heart, like air out of a punctured tire.
“Aren’t you making it rather hard for me?” I demanded, trying to hold myself in, but feeling the bob-cat getting the better of the purring tabby.
“I’ve rather concluded that was the way you made it for me,” countered Duncan, with a coolness of manner which I came more and more to resent.
“In what way?” I asked.
“In shutting up shop,” he rather listlessly responded.
“I don’t think I quite understand,” I told him.
“Well, in crowbarring me out of your scheme of life, if you insist on knowing,” were the words that came from the husband sitting so close beside me. “You had your other interests, of course. But you 235 also seem to have had the idea that you could turn me loose like a range horse. I could paw for my fodder and eat snow when I got thirsty. You didn’t even care to give me a wind-break to keep a forty-mile blizzard out of my bones. You didn’t know where I was browsing, and didn’t much care. It was up to me to rustle for myself and be rounded up when the winter was over and there was another spell of work on hand!”
We rode on in silence, for almost a mile, with the cold air beating against my body and a colder numbness creeping about the corner of my heart.
“Do you mean, Dinky-Dunk,” I finally asked, “that you want your freedom?”
“I’m not saying that,” he said, after another short silence.