He had explained the situation to her roughly long ago. Now he sat down to explain in detail, to outline his personal relation to an inherited problem.
"There it is," he concluded. "What do you think? I can go through with it, or I can let it go. It may beat me even if I do my best. At most we'll only have Hawk's Nest and some machinery. I can hardly hope to salvage more than that."
She looked at him for a second with an enigmatical smile.
"Why ask me, Rod?" she said finally. "You're going to do what one would naturally expect you to do. You've made up your mind. You don't really consider that you have much choice, do you?"
"No," he admitted. "I can't see that I have. I hate the job. I don't like cutting my own throat. I don't like paying for a dead horse that somebody else killed. But I simply can't do the other thing."
"I don't like poverty," Mary said presently. "I've known comparative poverty, though, and I'm not much the worse for it. I'm quite confident that between us we could manage very well if we had nothing but the clothes we stand in. One can sometimes turn dreams into dollars. No, I'm not much afraid of anything the world can do to us. Rod junior will manage to grow up into something of a man on considerably less than 'steen thousand a year. If you feel that something more vital to you than money is involved in this—— One has to be guided in such matters by one's convictions. A profound conviction, right or wrong, is a tremendous driving force. If you throttle it to grasp a material advantage— People do sometimes. And they suffer for it."
She sat tapping the pad with her pencil.
"Queer complications crop up over such a question," she said at last. "I wonder if you know that practically all my father's money is in the Norquay Trust. The few thousands that are to keep him and mamma in comfort while they live—all he saved out of a lifetime of work."
"Good Lord, no, I didn't know that," Rod said. "He didn't get it out when the scramble was on?"
She shook her head.