st what that means, I'd like to remind you that
there's----"

"I don't happen to have forgotten," I interrupted, wondering why news
which at one time would have set me on fire could now leave me quite
cold. "But what caused the government to change its mind?"

"Allie!" he said, after a moment's hesitation, fixing a slightly
combative eye on mine.

"She seems to have almost unlimited powers," I observed as coolly as I
could, making an effort to get my scattered thoughts into line again.

"On the contrary," Dinky-Dunk explained with quite painful politeness,
"it was merely the accident that she happened to know the naval
officer on the Imperial Board. She was at Banff the week the board was
there, and she was able to put in a good word for the Vancouver Island
site. And the Imperial verdict swung our own government officials
over."

"You were lucky to have such an attractive wirepuller," I frigidly
announced.

"The luck wasn't altogether on my side," Dinky-Dunk almost as frigidly
retorted, "when you remember that it was giving her a chance to get
rid of a ranch she was tired of!"

I did my best to hide my surprise, but it wasn't altogether a success.
The dimensions of the movement, apparently, were much greater than my
poor little brain had been able to grasp.

"Do you mean it's going to let you take Casa Grande off her ladyship's
hands?" I diffidently inquired.

"That's already arranged for," Dinky-Dunk quite casually informed me.
We were a couple of play-actors, I felt, each deep in a role of his
own, each stirred much deeper than he was ready to admit, and each a
little afraid of the other.

"You are to be congratulated," I told Dinky-Dunk, chilled in spite of
myself, never for a moment quite able to forget the sinister shadow of
Lady Alicia which lay across our trodden little path of everyday life.

"It was you and the kiddies I was thinking of," said my husband, in a
slightly remote voice. And the mockery of that statement, knowing what
I knew, was too much for me.

"I'm sorry you didn't think of us a little sooner," I observed. And I
had the bitter-sweet reward of seeing a stricken light creep up into
Dinky-Dunk's eyes.

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

But I didn't answer that question of his. Instead, I asked him
another.

"Did you know that Lady Alicia came here and announced that she was in
love with you?" I demanded, resolved to let the light in to that
tangled mess which was fermenting in