Tom over the estate.

"You have done well, Fred," Tom would say. "You have done very well."

He said it often, and often he drowsed in the big smooth-running
machine.

"Everything orderly and sanitary and spick and span--not a blade of
grass out of place," was Polly's comment. "How do you ever manage it? I
should not like to be a blade of grass on your land," she concluded,
with a little shivery shudder.

"You have worked hard," Tom said.

"Yes, I have worked hard," Frederick affirmed. "It was worth it."

He was going to say more, but the strange flash in the girl's eyes
brought him to an uncomfortable pause. He felt that she measured him,
challenged him. For the first time his honourable career of building a
county commonwealth had been questioned--and by a chit of a girl, the
daughter of a wastrel, herself but a flighty, fly-away, foreign
creature.

Conflict between them was inevitable. He had disliked her from the first
moment of meeting. She did not have to speak. Her mere presence made him
uncomfortable. He felt her unspoken disapproval, though there were times
when she did not stop at that. Nor did she mince language. She spoke
forthright, like a man, and as no man had ever dared to speak to him.

"I wonder if you ever miss what you've missed," she told him. "Did you
ever, once in your life, turn yourself loose and rip things up by the
roots? Did you ever once get drunk? Or smoke yourself black in the
face? Or dance a hoe-down on the ten commandments? Or stand up on your
hind legs and wink like a good fellow at God?"

"Isn't she a rare one!" Tom gurgled. "Her mother over again."

Outwardly smiling and calm, there was a chill of horror at Frederick's
heart. It was incredible.

"I think it is the English," she continued, "who have a saying that a
man has not lived until he has kissed his woman and struck his man. I
wonder--confess up, now--if you ever struck a man."

"Have you?" he countered.

She nodded, an angry reminiscent flash in her eyes, and waited.

"No, I have never had that pleasure," he answered slowly. "I early
learned control."

Later, irritated by his self-satisfied complacence and after listening
to a recital of how he had cornered the Klamath salmon-packing, planted
the first oysters on the bay and established that lucrative monopoly,
and of how, after exhausting litigation and a campaign of years he had
captured the water front of Williamsport and thereby won to control of
the Lum