"I believe his wife is more or less proud of him, sir. Her people have always followed the flag in some capacity."
"But how does she exist? Andrew Daney, if you're giving her the money—"
"If I am you have no right to ask impertinent questions about it. But I'm not."
"I never knew it, I never knew it," the old man complained bitterly. "Nobody tells me anything about my own son. I'm alone; I sit in the darkness, stifling with money—oh, Andrew, Andrew, I didn't say good-by to him! I let him go in sorrow and in anger."
"You may have time to cure all that. Go down to the Sawdust Pile, take the girl to your heart like a good father should and then cable the boy. That will square things beautifully."
Even in his great distress the stubborn old head was shaken emphatically. The Laird of Port Agnew was not yet ready to surrender.
Spring lengthened into summer and summer into fall. Quail piped in the logged-over lands and wild ducks whistled down through the timber and rested on the muddy bosom of the Skookum, but for the first time in forty years The Laird's setters remained in their kennels and his fowling pieces in their leather cases. To him the wonderful red and gold of the great Northern woods had lost the old allurement and he no longer thrilled when a ship of his fleet, homeward bound, dipped her house-flag far below him. He was slowly disintegrating.
Of late he had observed that Nan no longer came to church, so he assumed she had found the task of facing her world bravely one somewhat beyond her strength. A few months before, this realization would have proved a source of savage satisfaction to him, but time and suffering were working queer changes in his point of view. Now, although he told himself it served her right, he was sensible of a small feeling of sympathy for her and a large feeling of resentment against the conditions that had brought her into conflict with the world.
"I daresay," Andrew Daney remarked to him about Christmas time, "you haven't forgotten your resolve to do something handsome for that raftsman of Darrow's who saved your life last January. You told me to remind you of him at Christmas."
"I have not forgotten the incident," old Hector answered savagely.