“Afraid of what, mother?”
“Well, we were talking over this long struggle of yours to make a success of the Addition, Dan; and of course we’ve seen how hard you’ve been pressed from the very first, and yet you’ve always kept the thing a little alive and held on to it when time after time everybody said you’d just have to let go.”
“Yes, mother?”
“Well, it seems your father heard downtown to-day that this time you’d—you’d——”
“This time I’d what, mother?”
She put her arms about him and, in spite of her resolution, the compassion she felt for him was evident in her voice and in her eyes. “Oh, Dan, if this time you can’t hold on to it any longer, you mustn’t feel too badly, please!”
He had bent over her as she embraced him; but now he threw back his shoulders and laughed. “So that’s what father heard to-day,” he said. “You tell him he was listening to the wrong crowd, mother!” He moved her gently toward the door, his arm about her. “You go to bed, and so will I.” He laughed again, not grimly or bitterly, but with deep and hearty mirth. “Why, there isn’t any more chance of my not keepin’ hold of Ornaby than there is of this house fallin’ off the earth onto the moon! They can’t foreclose on me for anyhow two weeks more, and by that time I’ll show ’em what’s what! I sold a lot only last month, and there’ve been three more men out there already to look at locations. Two weeks is plenty of time for things to happen, mother. Don’t you worry.”
He kissed her good-night, and as she smiled back at him from the hall and told him she wouldn’t worry if he’d get some sleep, he went on: “Why, they haven’t any more chance to get Ornaby away from me than they have to—than they have to”—he paused, searching for a sufficient comparison, and, finding it, finished with cheery explosiveness—“than they have to get Henry Daniel Oliphant himself away from me!”
Upon this she went to her own door down the hall, where she nodded and whispered back to him a smiling good-night, and disappeared, glad to see him so abundantly recovered from his brief depression. “Somehow I believe he will manage to keep on going, even this time,” she told her husband. “He’s so sure failure’s an absolute impossibility that I do think maybe——”
“No, I don’t see even a ‘maybe’ in it for him,” Mr. Oliphant said, and shook his head. “Not this time, I’m afraid.”