ing up toward his forehead.

"I'm only taking your own word for that," I reminded him, deliberately
steeling my heart against the tides of compassion that were trying to
dissolve it. "And I'm only taking what is, after all, the easiest
course out of the situation."

Dinky-Dunk's color receded, leaving his face even more than ever the
color of old cheese, for all the tan of wind and sun which customarily
tinted it, like afterglow on a stubbled hillside.

"But Lady Alicia herself still has something to say about all this,"
he reminded me.

"Lady Alicia had better rope in her ranch when the roping is good," I
retorted, chilled a little by her repeated intrusion into the
situation. For I had no intention of speaking of Lady Alicia Newland
with bated breath, just because she had a title. I'd scratched dances
with a duke or two myself, in my time, even though I could already see
myself once more wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a
hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch.

"You're missing the point," began Dinky-Dunk.

"Listen!" I suddenly commanded. A harried roebuck has nothing on a
young mother for acuteness of hearing. And thin and faint, from
above-stairs, I caught the sound of a treble wailing which was
promptly augmented into a duet.

"Poppsy's got Pee-Wee awake," I announced as I rose from my chair. It
seemed something suddenly remote and small, this losing of a fortune,
before the more imminent problem of getting a pair of crying babies
safely to sleep. I realized that as I ran upstairs and started the
swing-box penduluming back and forth. I even found myself much calmer
in spirit by the time I'd crooned and soothed the Twins off again. And
I was smiling a little, I think, as I went down to my poor old
Dinky-Dunk, for he held out a hand and barred my way as I rounded the
table to resume my seat opposite him.

"You don't despise me, do you?" he demanded, holding me by the sleeve
and studying me with a slightly mystified eye. It was an eye as
wistful as an old hound's in winter, an eye with a hunger I'd not seen
there this many a day.

"Despise you, Acushla?" I echoed, with a catch in my throat, as my
arms closed about him. And as he clung to me, with a forlorn sort of
desperation, a soul-Chinook seemed to sweep up the cold fogs that had
gathered and swung between us for so many months. I'd worried, in
secret, about that fog. I'd tried to tell myself that it was the
coming of the children that h