“Well?” she repeated.
He lifted his head. “What I have got to say is—well, confound it, it is hard to say,” he began. “For me, anyhow. Reliance, I suppose you think I’ve got a grudge against you for—that business of Esther’s. I haven’t.”
“I am glad of that, Foster.”
She was glad, especially glad to hear him say it. In spite of her assurances to Esther, she had begun to think he never would.
“Don’t you misunderstand me,” he went on, sharply. “I am no more in favor of her marrying that Griffin cub than I ever was. She made a big mistake there. If she had left it to me I could have found her a husband that was something more than a picture dauber. You bet I could! And he wouldn’t have been a Cook either.”
There was much she might have said, much she wanted to say, but she thought it inadvisable just then.
“We all of us make mistakes, Foster,” was her only comment.
“Humph! Yes, we do. I have made a lot in my life. Well, if I had it to live over again, I would make the same ones, I shouldn’t wonder. I am built that way. I can no more help bossing other people’s affair than I can help breathing. I like to do it, always did. I don’t know as it pays, though.”
“I don’t believe it does, Foster.”
“It paid with Mooney just now, didn’t it?... Oh, well, you may be right. I certainly haven’t made what you might call a first-class job of it for the last three or four years.... Well, that wasn’t what I started to say. Reliance, you did one first-class job that night when you made Esther and—and that fellow of hers get married before they left Harniss. Get married right in your own house, with you to stand by and see them sign articles. That saved talk—and dirty, mean talk that might have hung around the girl all her life.”