Mary laughed drearily. "Now you're talking like a child!" Then her voice cleared with unwonted purposefulness. "No one who hasn't been married can possibly understand men, or fear them or despise them, like they ought to be feared and despised. When I think what I was before I married and what I am now, I feel like I wanted to put Judith where she never could see a man. It's not right that a woman should suffer so. It's not right to lose all your dreams like I've lost mine. Marriage was never meant to be so."
Douglas scowled in his astonishment. Mary had been feeling like this all along when he'd been thinking of her as without nerve! Here, then, was somebody else lonely, like himself and Judith.
"I'm sorry, Mother," he said awkwardly. "I'll do what I can to change it."
"You can't do anything, my dear. What I'm suffering is in the nature of things."
"Well, anyhow, you ought to warn Jude," repeated Douglas.
"I can't!" said Mary. "Doug, if I do she'd guess how cowardly I am and how I suffer—in my mind, I mean," and she put her hands over her face with a dry sob.
Douglas put his long young arm about her. "I'll take care of it for you,"
he said huskily. "Judith don't know it but she's got somebody besides old
Peter ridin' herd on her now. And you know I'm some little old herder,
Mother!"
"I know you're a man!" exclaimed Mary. "The kind of a man that's mighty scarce in Lost Chief Valley." She turned away toward the house.
Douglas picked a bridle from the fence and started after Buster.
It was nearly supper time and Doug and his father were reading in the living-room when Judith returned. The wind had risen and fine particles of snow sifted under the eaves and over the table. The wood stove glowed red hot and the smell of cedar mingled with that of frying beef in the kitchen.