"Am I to understand from that that you don't care to advance me whatever sum I require?" he asked gently.

"I don't see why I should," Mrs. Gower replied after a second's reflection, "even if I were quite able to do so. This place costs something to keep up. I can't very well manage on less than two thousand a month. And Betty and I must be clothed. You haven't contributed much recently, Horace."

"No? I had the impression that I had been contributing pretty freely for thirty years," Gower returned dryly. "I paid the bills up to December.

Last season wasn't a particularly good one--for me."

"That was chiefly due to your own mismanagement, I should say," Mrs.

Gower commented tartly. "Putting the whole cannery burden on Norman when the poor boy had absolutely no experience. Really, you must have mismanaged dreadfully. I heard only the other day that the Robbin-Steele plants did better last season than they ever did. I'm sure the Abbotts made money last year. If the banks have lost faith in your business ability, I--well, I should consider you a bad risk, Horace. I can't afford to gamble."

"You never do. You only play cinches," Gower grunted. "However, your money will be safe enough. I didn't say the banks refuse me credit. I have excellent reasons for borrowing of you."

"I really do not see how I can possibly let you have such a sum," she said. "You already have twenty thousand dollars of my money tied up in your business, you know."

"You have an income of twelve thousand a year from the Maple Point place," Gower recited in that unchanging, even tone. "You have over twenty thousand cash on deposit. And you have eighty thousand dollars in Victory Bonds. You mean you don't want to, Bessie."

"You may accept that as my meaning," she returned.

"There are times in every man's career," Gower remarked dispa.s.sionately, "when the lack of a little money might break him."

"That is all the more reason why I should safeguard my funds," Mrs.

Gower replied. "You are not as young as you were, Horace. If you should fail now, you would likely never get on your feet again. But we could manage, I dare say, on what I have. That is why I do not care to risk any of it."

"You refuse then, absolutely, to let me have this money?" he asked.

"I do," Mrs. Gower replied, with an air of pained but conscious rect.i.tude. "I should consider myself most unwise to do so."

"All right," Gower returned indifferently. "You force me to a showdown.

I have poured money into your hands for years for you to squander in keeping up your position--as you call it. I'm about through doing that.

I'm sick of aping millionaires. All I need is a comfortable place where I can smoke a pipe in peace. This house is mine. I shall sell it and repay you your twenty thousand. You--"

"Horace! Sell this house. Our home! _Horace._"

"Our home?" Gower continued inflexibly. "The place where we eat and sleep and entertain, you mean. We never had a home, Bessie. You will have your ancestral hall at Maple Point. You will be quite able to afford a Vancouver house if you choose. But this is mine, and it's going into the discard. I shall owe you nothing. I shall still have the cottage at Cradle Bay, if I go smash, and that is quite good enough for me. Do I make myself clear?"

Mrs. Gower was sniffing. She had taken refuge with the pince-nez and the polishing cloth. But her fingers were tremulous, and her expression was that of a woman who feels herself sadly abused and who is about to indulge in luxurious weeping.

"But, Horace, to sell this house over my head--what will p-people say?"

"I don't care two whoops what people say," Mr. Gower replied unfeelingly.

"This is simp-ply outrageous! How is Betty going to m-meet p-people?"

"You mean," her husband retorted, "how are you going to contrive the proper background against which Betty shall display her charms to the different varieties of saphead which you hit upon as being eligible to marry her? Don't worry. With the carefully conserved means at your disposal you will still be able to maintain yourself in the station in which it has pleased G.o.d to place you. You will be able to see that Betty has the proper advantages."

This straw broke the camel's back, if it is proper so to speak of a middle-aged, delicate-featured lady, delightfully gowned and coiffed and manicured. Mrs. Gower's grief waxed crescendo. Whereupon her husband, with no manifest change of expression beyond an unpleasant narrowing of his eyes, heaved his short, flesh-burdened body out of the chair and left the room.

Betty had sat silent through this conversation, a look of profound distaste slowly gathering on her fresh young face. She gazed after her father. When the door closed upon him Betty's gray eyes came to rest on her mother's bowed head and shaking shoulders. There was nothing in Betty Gower's expression which remotely suggested sympathy. She said nothing. She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her pretty chin in her cupped palms.

Mrs. Gower presently became aware of this detached, observing, almost critical att.i.tude.

"Your f-father is p-positively b-brutal," she found voice to declare.

"There are various sorts of brutality," Betty observed enigmatically. "I don't think daddy has a corner on the visible supply. Are you going to let him have that money?"

"No. Never," Mrs. Gower snapped.

"You may lose a great deal more than the house by that," Betty murmured.

But if Mrs. Gower heard the words they conveyed no meaning to her agitated mind. She was rapidly approaching that incomprehensible state in which a woman laughs and cries in the same breath, and Betty got up with a faintly contemptuous curl to her red lips. She went out into the hall and pressed a b.u.t.ton. A maid materialized.

"Go into the dining room and attend to mamma, if you please, Mary,"

Betty said.

Then she skipped nimbly upstairs, two steps at a time, and went into a room on the second floor, a room furnished something after the fashion of a library in which her father sat in a big leather chair chewing on an unlighted cigar.

Betty perched on the arm of his chair and ran her fingers through a patch on top of his head where the hair was growing a bit thin.

"Daddy," she asked, "did you mean that about going smash?"

"Possibility," he grunted.

"Are you really going to sell this house and live at Cradle Bay?"

"Sure. You sorry?"

"About the house? Oh, no. It's only a place for mamma to make a splash, as Norman said. If you hibernate at the cottage I'll come and keep house for you."

Gower considered this.

"You ought to stay with your mother," he said finally. "She'll be able to give you a lot I wouldn't make an effort to provide. You don't know what it means really to work. You'd find it pretty slow at Squitty."

"Maybe," Betty said. "But we managed very well last winter, just you and me. If there is going to be a break-up of the family I shall stay with you. I'm a daddy's girl."

Gower drew her face down and kissed it.

"You are that," he said huskily. "You're all Gower. There's real stuff in you. You're free of that d.a.m.ned wishy-washy Morton blood. She made a poodle dog of Norman, but she couldn't spoil you. We'll manage, eh, Betty?"

"Of course," Betty returned. "But I don't know that Norman is such a hopeless case. Didn't he rather take your breath away with his declaration of independence?"

"It takes more than a declaration to win independence," Gower answered grimly. "Wait till the going gets hard. However, I'll say there's a chance for Norman. Now, you run along, Betty. I've got some figuring to do."

CHAPTER XVII

Business as Usual