Moraine's manner was becoming more aggressive, and Monica was losing patience.
"You're not encouraging, but you're quite wrong. I can assure you I can run this farm with just as stern a discipline as you. Perhaps you have yet to learn that a woman's discipline can be far harsher, if need be, than any man's. Evidently you have not had much to do with women. Believe me, my sex are by no means the angels some people would have you believe."
"No."
The man's negative came in such a peculiar, almost insolent tone that Monica was startled. She looked at him, and, as she did so, beheld an unpleasantly ironical light in his cold eyes. She interpreted this attitude in her own way.
"You seem to feel leaving your control here," she said sharply.
The man's expression underwent a prompt change. He was her husband's employee once more. The insolent irony had utterly vanished out of his eyes.
"I do, mam," he said earnestly. "I feel it a heap—and it makes me feel bad. That's—that's why I've told you—all this."
Monica's resentment died out before the man's earnestness.
"I don't think I understand you," she said more gently.
"I didn't guess you would." The Scot leaned forward in his saddle, and his face lit with something like appeal. "You see, mam, you haven't taken a patch of prairie land and turned it into the greatest single-handed grain-growing proposition in the world. You haven't worked years and years fighting men and elements, and beaten 'em, until you can sit back and reckon your yearly crop to almost the fraction of a bushel. And if you haven't done these things—why, 'tisn't likely you're going to understand how I feel.