Coast," he said, compelling himself to meet my glance.

"I'm sorry that I cut your holiday short," I told him.

"It was scarcely a holiday," he remonstrated.

"What would you call it then?" I asked.

"It was purely a business trip," he retorted.

There had, I remembered, been a great deal of that business during the
past few months. And an ice-cold hand squeezed the last hope of hope
out of my heart. _She_ had been at the Coast.

"And this belated visit to your wife and children, I presume, is also
for business purposes?" I inquired. But he was able to smile at that,
for all my iciness.

"_Is_ it belated?" he asked.

"Wouldn't you call it that?" I quietly inquired.

"But I had to clear up that case of the stolen horses," he protested,
"that Sing Lo thievery."

"Which naturally comes before one's family," I ironically reminded
him.

"But courts are courts, Chaddie," he maintained, with a pretense of
patience.

"And consideration is consideration," I rather wearily amended.

"We can't always do what we want to," he next remarked, apparently
intent on being genially axiomatic.

"Then to what must the humble family attribute this visit?" I
inquired, despising that tone of mockery into which I had fallen yet
seeming unable to drag myself out of its muck-bottom depths.

"To announce that I intend to return to them," he asserted, though it
didn't seem an easy statement to make.

It rather took my breath away, for a moment. But Reason remained on
her throne. It was too much like sticking spurs into a dead horse.
There was too much that could not be forgotten. And I calmly reminded
Dinky-Dunk that the lightest of heads can sometimes have the longest
of memories.

"Then you don't want me back?" he demanded, apparently embarrassed by
my lack of hospitality.

"It all depends on what you mean by that word," I answered, speaking
as judicially as I was able. "If by coming back you mean coming back
to this house, I suppose you have a legal right to do so. But if it
means anything more, I'm afraid it can't be done. You see, Dinky-Dunk,
I've got rather used to single harness again, and I've learned to
think and act for myself, and there's a time when continued unfairness
can kill the last little spark of friendliness in any woman's heart.
It's not merely that I'm tired of it all. But I'm _tired of being
tired_, if you know what that means. I don't even know what I'm going
to do. Just at present, in fact, I don't