Geraldine's mouth, which drooped at the corners and created the dimples she hated, when it fell a-smiling, was ready to yield to him!
Geraldine's face, and beauty, and spirit were true to him!
He could not tell how long it was before he got possession of himself. The candles were dripping low in their tin sockets, and one of the women who loved him was still in her chair near his elbow, frightened, and quiet, and intense.
He had held out a hand to her and she had come over and knelt at his side.
"Little one," he had said, "this life is not right for our children. To-morrow we must get the priest and be married. There is money now, and they must be taught to live more cleverly than their father and their mother."
He had left her perplexed in her relief, while he threw himself on the bed for the sleep of utter exhaustion.
The burden of life would be doubly worse with the material leisure money could bring, but Frazer had never stopped toiling all his days. He could not.
Money in the helpless hands of his wife meant only unwelcome care for her, and their exclusion in a larger, isolated home was in no sense different from life in their cabin.
Frazer held himself aloof from the movement of the growing towns and cities, and watched the weak physical fiber of his children, marked by their unambitious Southern strain. Energy for acquirement of any sort was not theirs, and for his family his money meant only the material supply of food and clothes.
From this very home on the reservoir banks he had gone to his mines with a regularity interrupted only when it was necessary to follow the coffin of one of his children to the rocky, shrub-dotted cemetery on the hills. There had been three of them, and none of the apparently sturdy children had escaped the fatal collapse of consumption.