want to think about it. But
I'd much prefer being alone until I am able to straighten things out
to my own satisfaction."

"I'm sorry," said Dinky-Dunk, looking so crestfallen that for a moment
I in turn felt almost sorry for him.

"Isn't it rather late for that?" I reminded him.

"Yes, I suppose it is," he admitted, with a disturbing new note of
humility. Then he looked up at me, almost defiantly. "But you need my
help."

It was masterful man, once more asserting himself. It was a trivial
misstep, but a fatal one. It betrayed, at a flash, his entire
misjudgment of me, of my feelings, of what I was and what I intended
to be.

"I'm afraid I've rather outlived that period of Bashi-Bazookism," I
coolly and quietly explained to my lord and master. "You may have the
good luck to be confronting me when I seem to be floored. I've been
hailed out, it's true. But that has happened to other people, and they
seem to have survived. And there are worse calamities, I find, than
the loss of a crop."

"Are you referring to anything that I have done?" asked Dinky-Dunk,
with a slightly belligerent look in his eye.

"If the shoe fits, put it on," I observed.

"But there are certain things I want to explain," he tried to argue,
with the look of a man confronted by an overdraft on his patience.

"Somebody has said that a friend," I reminded him, "is a person to
whom one need never explain. And any necessity for explanation, you
see, removes us even from the realm of friendship."

"But, hang it all, I'm your husband," protested my obtuse and somewhat
indignant interlocutor.

"We all have our misfortunes," I found the heart, or rather the
absence of heart, to remark.

"I'm afraid this isn't a very good beginning," said Dinky-Dunk, his
dignity more ruffled than ever.

"It's not a beginning at all," I reminded him. "It's more like an
ending."

That kept him silent for quite a long while.

"I suppose you despise me," he finally remarked.

"It's scarcely so active an emotion," I tried to punish him by
retorting.

"But I at least insist on explaining what took me to the Coast," he
contended.

"That is scarcely necessary," I told him.

"Then you know?" he asked.

"I imagine the whole country-side does," I observed.

He made a movement of mixed anger and protest.

"I went to Vancouver because the government had agreed to take over my
Vancouver Island water-front for their new shipbuilding yards. If
you've forgotten ju