"What! Are you going to stay with Mr. Dround, after all? And all that money you were telling me about—millions!" she drawled in her soft voice like a disappointed child.
She seemed troubled to know that after all I had given up my chance to make money with Strauss and Carmichael.
"I guess we shan't starve, Sarah," I laughed back.
"You must do what you think best," she said finally, and repeated her favorite maxim, "I don't believe in a woman's interfering in a man's business."
After supper, as we sat out in the warm night, Will talked of his trip through the Southwest.
"It's a mighty big country down there, and not touched. You folks up North here haven't begun to see what is coming to that country. It's the new promised land!"
And he went raving on in the style I love to hear, with the sunshine of great lands on his face and the wind from the prairies blowing low in his voice. It was like music that set my thoughts in flow, and I began to see my scheme unfold, stretch out, embrace this new fertile country, reach on to foreign shores.... Then my thoughts went back to the garden by the lake, with the piece of yellow marble in the wall.
"That's a pretty little place the Drounds have behind their house," I remarked vaguely to Sarah in a pause of Will's enthusiasm.
"What were you doing in the Drounds' garden?" Sarah asked quickly.
"Oh, talking business!"