“You didn’t drink anything at dinner, either, did you?” he asked.

She flushed as she said, “I don’t think I’m drinking, at all, just now.”

“Being an example to anybody?” he asked suspiciously.

She smiled at that and patted his hand.  “Oh, no, my dear.  I’ve enough to do to be an example to myself.  I liked the way it was out at the Corbetts’.  They’ve gone bone-dry.  And,—­oh, please don’t think that I’m a prig—­I am a little better without it—­just now, anyway.  Tell me what’s gone wrong at the farm.”

“This is wonderful stuff,” he said, cupping the fragile glass in his two hands and inhaling the bouquet from the precious liquor in the bottom of it.  “It’s good for nightmares, at any rate.”  After a sip or two, he attempted to answer her question.

“Oh, I suppose we’ll come out all right, eventually.  Of course, we’ve got to.  But I wish Martin Whitney had done one thing or the other; either shown a little real confidence and enthusiasm in the thing or else stepped on it and refused to lend father the money.”

“Lend?” Mary asked.  “Did he have to borrow it?”

He dealt rather impatiently with that question.  “You don’t keep sixty or eighty thousand dollars lying around loose in a checking account,” he said.  “Of course, he had to borrow it.  But he borrowed it of Whitney, worse luck—­and Whitney being an old friend, pulls a long face over it whenever we find we need a little more than the original figures showed.  That’s enough to give any one cold feet right there.

“Graham’s father is rich, of course, but he’s tighter than the bark on a tree.  He’s gone his limit and he won’t stand for anything more.  He can’t see that a farm like that is nothing but a factory and that you can’t run it for any profit that’s worth while without the very best possible equipment.  He wanted us to pike along with scrub stock and the old tools and buildings that were on the place and pay for improvements out of our profits.  Of course, the answer to that was that there wouldn’t be any profits.  A grade cow these days simply can’t earn her keep with the price of feed and labor what it is.  We didn’t figure the cost of tools and modern buildings high enough—­there was such a devil of a lot of necessary things that we didn’t figure on at all—­and the consequence was that we didn’t put a big enough mortgage on the place.  Nowhere near what it would stand.  And now that we want to put a second one on, Mr. Stannard howls like a wolf.”

The mere sound of the word mortgage made Mary’s heart sink.  She looked so woebegone that Rush went on hastily.

“Oh, that’ll come out in the wash.  It’s nothing to worry about really, because even on the basis of a bigger investment than we had any idea of making when we went in, it figures a peach of a profit.  There’s no getting away from that.  That’s not the thing about it that’s driving Graham and me to drink.”