letters, which I knew to be the mail he had just brought home and flung there. But he wasn’t looking at anything on his desk. He was merely sitting there staring vacantly out of the window at the paling light. His elbows were on the arms of his Bank of England swivel-chair for which I’d made the green baize seat-pad, and as I stared in at him, half in shadow, I had an odd impression of history repeating itself. This puzzled me, for a moment, until I remembered having caught sight of him in much the same attitude, only a few days before. But this time he looked so tired and drawn and spineless that a fish-hook of sudden pity tugged at my throat. For my Dinky-Dunk sat there without moving, with the hope and the joy of life drawn utterly out of his bony big body. The heavy emptiness of his face, as rugged as a relief-map in the side-light, even made me forget the smell of the scones Iroquois Annie was vindictively scorching down in the kitchen. He didn’t know, of course, that I was watching him, for he jumped as I signaled my presence by slamming the door after stepping in through it. That jump, I knew, wasn’t altogether due to edgy nerves. It was also an effort at dissimulation, for his sudden struggle to get his scattered lines of manhood together still carried a touch of the heroic. But I’d caught a glimpse of his soul when it wasn’t on parade. And I knew what I knew. He tried to work his poor old harried face into a smile as I crossed over to his side. But, like Topsy’s kindred, it died a-borning.

“What’s happened?” I asked

“What’s happened?” I asked, dropping on my knees close beside him.

Instead of answering me, he swung about in the swivel-chair so that he more directly faced the window. The movement also served to pull away the hand which I had almost succeeded in capturing. Nothing, I’ve found, can wound a real man more than pity.

“What’s happened?” I repeated. For I knew, now, that something was really and truly and tragically wrong, as plainly as though Dinky-Dunk had up and told me so by word of mouth. You can’t live with a man for nearly four years without growing into a sort of clairvoyant knowledge of those subterranean little currents that feed the wells of mood and temper and character. He pushed the papers on the desk away from him without looking at me.

“Oh, it’s nothing much,” he said. But he said it so listlessly I knew he was merely trying to lie like a gentleman.

“If it’s bad news, I want to know it, right slam-bang out,” I told him. And for the first time he turned and looked at me, in a meditative and impersonal sort of way that brought the fish-hook tugging at my thorax again. He looked at me as though some inner part of him were still debating as to whether or not he was about to be confronted by a woman in tears. Then a touch of cool desperation crept up into his eyes.

“Our whole apple-cart’s gone over,” he slowly and quietly announced, with those coldly narrowed eyes still intent on my face, as though very little and yet a very great deal depended on just how I was going to accept that slightly enigmatic remark. And he must have noticed the quick frown of perplexity which probably came to my face, for that right hand of his resting on the table opened and then closed again, as though it were squeezing a sponge very dry. “They’ve got me,” he said. “They’ve got me—to the last dollar!”

I stood up in the uncertain light, for it takes time to digest strong words, the same as it takes time to digest strong meat.

I remembered how, during the last half-year, Dinky-Dunk had been on the wing, hurrying over to Calgary, and Edmonton, flying east to Winnipeg, scurrying off to the Coast, poring over township maps and blue-prints and official-looking letters from land associations and banks and loan companies. I had been called in to sign papers, with bread-dough on my arms, and asked to witness signatures, with Dinkie on my hip, and commanded by my absent hearth-mate to send on certain documents by the next mail. I had also gathered up scattered sheets of paper covered with close-penciled rows of figures, and had felt that Dinky-Dunk for a year back had been giving more time to his speculations than to his home and his ranch. I had seen the lines deepen a little on that lean and bony face of his and the pepper-and-salt above his ears turning into almost pure salt. And I’d missed, this many a day, the old boyish note in his laughter and the old careless intimacies in his talk. And being a woman of almost ordinary intelligence—preoccupied as I was with those three precious babies of mine—I had arrived at the not unnatural conclusion that my spouse was surrendering more and more to that passion of his for wealth and power.

Wealth and power, of course, are big words in the language of any man. But I had more than an inkling that my husband had been taking a gambler’s chance to reach the end in view. And now, in that twilit shadow-huddled cubby-hole of a room, it came over me, all of a heap, that having taken the gambler’s chance, we had met a fate not uncommon to gamblers, and had lost.

“So we’re bust!” I remarked, without any great show of emotion, feeling, I suppose, that without worldly goods we might consistently be without elegance. And in the back of my brain I was silently revising our old Kansas pioneer couplet into

But it wasn’t a joke. You can’t have the bottom knocked out of your world, naturally, and find an invisible Nero blithely fiddling on your heart-strings. And I hated to see Dinky-Dunk sitting there with that dead look in his eyes. I hated to see him with his spirit broken, with that hollow and haggard misery about the jowls, which made me think of a hound-dog mourning for a dead master.

But I knew better than to show any pity for Dinky-Dunk at such a time. It would have been effective as a stage-picture, I know, my reaching out and pressing his tired head against a breast sobbing with comprehension and shaking with compassion. But pity, with real men-folks in real life, is perilous stuff to deal in. I was equally afraid to feel sorry for myself, even though my body chilled with the sudden suspicion that Casa Grande and all it held might be taken away from me, that my bairns might be turned out of their warm and comfortable beds, overnight, that the consoling sense of security which those years of labor had builded up about us might vanish in a breath. And I needed new flannelette for the Twins’ nighties, and a reefer for little Dinky-Dunk, and an aluminum double-boiler that didn’t leak for me maun’s porritch. There were rafts of things I needed, rafts and rafts of them. But here we were bust, so far as I could tell, on the rocks, swamped, stranded and wrecked.

I held myself in, however, even if it did take an effort. I crossed casually over to the door, and opened it to sniff at the smell of supper.

“Whatever happens, Dinky-Dunk,” I very calmly announced, “we’ve got to eat. And if that she-Indian scorches another scone I’ll go down there and scalp her.”

My husband got slowly and heavily up out of the chair, which gave out a squeak or two even when relieved of his weight. I knew by his face in the half-light that he was going to say that he didn’t care to eat.

But,