own had said would be ambling up there to their
winter quarters. And there would be the scream of the mountain
lions--Jack had more than once heard them at night down in the forest
below him, and had thrilled to the sound. He would stalk the shy deer
and carry meat to his cave and broil the flesh over his tiny
campfire--don't tell me that the boy in any normal young man would not
rise enthusiastically to that bait!

But there were other times, when Marion was not there; when Jack was
alone with the stars and the dark bulk of the wooded slopes beneath
him; times when the adventure paled and grew bleak before his soul, so
that he shrank from it appalled. Times when he could not shut out the
picture of the proud, stately Mrs. Singleton Corey, hiding humiliated
and broken of spirit in a sanatorium, shamed before the world because
he was her son. Not all the secret caves the mountains held could dull
the pain of that thought when it assailed him in the dark stillness of
the peak.

For Jack was her true offspring in pride, if no more. He had been a
sensitive youngster who had resented passionately his mother's slights
upon his vague memory of the dad who had given him his adventurous
spirit and his rebellion against the restraints of mere convention,
which was his mother's dearest god. Unknown to Mrs. Singleton Corey,
he had ardently espoused the cause of his wandering dad, and had
withdrawn his love from the arrogant lady-mother, who never once spoke
affectionately of the man Jack loved. He had taken what money she gave
him. It was his dad's money, for his dad had suffered hardship to
wrest it from the earth, in the mines that kept Mrs. Singleton Corey
in soft, perfumed luxury. His dad would have wanted Jack to have it,
so Jack took all she would give him and did not feel particularly
grateful to her because she was fairly generous in giving.

But now the very pride that he had inherited from her turned upon him
the savage weapons of memory. He had swift visions of his mother
mounting the steps of some mansion, going graciously to make a
fashionable ten-minute call upon some friend, while Jack played
chauffeur for the occasion. She couldn't go calling now on the
Westlake millionaires' wives, taunted memory. Neither could she
preside at the club teas; nor invite forty or fifty twittery women
into her big double parlors and queen it over them as Jack had so
often seen her do. She could not do any of the things that had made