She was silent.
"Our share was ninety thousand dollars! And the place didn't cost fifty."
"I'm sorry to see any of it go, Paul. It would make such a wonderful home for our children—when they're grown up and married, and have their own little homes within reach——"
He crushed the cigar beneath his heel. "You're much too sentimental, sometimes, Mary. The children wouldn't thank me to hold on to the land, when I can get a hundred and ten a foot for inside lots."
"We have all the money we can possibly use now, Paul. You must have made a hundred and fifty thousand this year——"
"That hardly touches it."
"It makes me afraid, sometimes—our having so much, when so many people have so little. If we could just keep Hillcrest as it is——"
"We haven't anything," he answered sharply. "Jack Lamar and his brother came here just before I did; they've five million apiece. And God only knows how much Russell Ross has made out of iron. He's in with that South Atlantic Steel bunch; he could sell out for twenty-five millions to-morrow, I verily believe.... I'd be lucky to get a million."
She stubbornly returned to what was on her mind. "And now you are willing to take this wonderful estate you have worked over for ten years, and throw it away, because Russell Ross has more money than you! Think what the Rosses were."
"My father wouldn't have wiped his shoes on them. And any one of them could buy out Jackson three or four times now. This mountain—if it's handled right—it will simply mint money. It will be a mountain of gold."