MADELINE:  Not very well. (a quality which seems sullenness) I couldn’t bear to look at him.  He shook so.

FEJEVARY:  (turning away, real pain) Oh—­how cruel!

MADELINE:  (surprised, gently) Cruel?  Me—­cruel?

FEJEVARY:  Not just you.  The way it passes—­(to himself) so fast it passes.

MADELINE:  I’m sorry. (troubled) You see, he was too old then—­

FEJEVARY:  (his hand up to stop her) I wish I could bring him back for a moment, so you could see what he was before he (bitterly) shook so.  He was a powerful man, who was as real as the earth.  He was strangely of the earth, as if something went from it to him. (looking at her intently) Queer you should be the one to have no sentiment about him, for you and he—­sometimes when I’m with you it’s as if—­he were near.  He had no personal ambition, Madeline.  He was ambitious for the earth and its people.  I wonder if you can realize what it meant to my father—­in a strange land, where he might so easily have been misunderstood, pushed down, to find a friend like that?  It wasn’t so much the material things—­though Uncle Silas was always making them right—­and as if—­oh, hardly conscious what he was doing—­so little it mattered.  It was the way he got father, and by that very valuing kept alive what was there to value.  Why, he literally laid this country at my father’s feet—­as if that was what this country was for, as if it made up for the hard early things—­for the wrong things.

MADELINE:  He must really have been a pretty nice old party.  No doubt I would have hit it off with him all right.  I don’t seem to hit it off with the—­speeches about him.  Somehow I want to say, ’Oh, give us a rest.’

FEJEVARY:  (offended) And that, I presume, is what you want to say to me.

MADELINE:  No, no, I didn’t mean you, Uncle.  Though (hesitatingly) I was wondering how you could think you were talking on your side.

FEJEVARY:  What do you mean—­my side?

MADELINE:  Oh, I don’t—­exactly.  That’s nice about him being—­of the earth.  Sometimes when I’m out for a tramp—­way off by myself—­yes, I know.  And I wonder if that doesn’t explain his feeling about the Indians.  Father told me how grandfather took it to heart about the Indians.

FEJEVARY:  He felt it as you’d feel it if it were your brother.  So he must give his choicest land to the thing we might become.  ’Then maybe I can lie under the same sod with the red boys and not be ashamed.’

(MADELINE nods, appreciatively.)

MADELINE:  Yes, that’s really—­all right.

FEJEVARY:  (irritated by what seems charily stated approval) ’All right!’ Well, I am not willing to let this man’s name pass from our time.  And it seems rather bitter that Silas Morton’s granddaughter should be the one to stand in my way.