“I suppose you are right,” he said simply.

She glanced quickly at him, and her eyebrows straightened.  He had risen, his face white and his gray eyes widely opened.  “I suppose you are right,” he went on, “because you are saying to me what my partners said to me this morning, when I offered to share my wealth with them, God knows as honestly as I offered to share my heart with you.  I suppose that you are both right; that there must be some curse of pride or selfishness upon the money that I have got; but I have not felt it yet, and the fault does not lie with me.”

She gave her shoulders a slight shrug, and turned impatiently toward the window.  When she turned back again he was gone.  The room around her was empty; this room, which a moment before had seemed to be pulsating with his boyish passion, was now empty, and empty of him.  She bit her lips, rose, and ran eagerly to the window.  She saw his straw hat and brown curls as he crossed the road.  She drew her handkerchief sharply away from the withered shrub over which she had thrown it, and cast the once treasured remains in the hearth.  Then, possibly because she had it ready in her hand, she clapped the handkerchief to her eyes, and sinking sideways upon the chair he had risen from, put her elbows on its back, and buried her face in her hands.

It is the characteristic and perhaps cruelty of a simple nature to make no allowance for complex motives, or to even understand them!  So it seemed to Barker that his simplicity had been met with equal directness.  It was the possession of this wealth that had in some way hopelessly changed his relations with the world.  He did not love Kitty any the less; he did not even think she had wronged him; they, his partners and his sweetheart, were cleverer than he; there must be some occult quality in this wealth that he would understand when he possessed it, and perhaps it might even make him ashamed of his generosity; not in the way they had said, but in his tempting them so audaciously to assume a wrong position.  It behoved him to take possession of it at once, and to take also upon himself alone the knowledge, the trials, and responsibilities it would incur.  His cheeks flushed again as he thought he had tried to tempt an innocent girl with it, and he was keenly hurt that he had not seen in Kitty’s eyes the tenderness that had softened his partners’ refusal.  He resolved to wait no longer, but sell his dreadful stock at once.  He walked directly to the bank.

The manager, a shrewd but kindly man, to whom Barker was known already, received him graciously in recognition of his well-known simple honesty, and respectfully as a representative of the equally well-known poor but “superior” partnership of the Gulch.  He listened with marked attention to Barker’s hesitating but brief story, only remarking at its close: 

“You mean, of course, the ‘second Extension’ when you say ’First’?”