“I couldn’t make a fair estimate before I have been over the ground.  Seattle promoters are listing Wenatchee fruit lands now, but the Weatherbee tract is off the main valley.  Still, the railroad passes within a few miles, and the property must have made some advance since he bought the quarter section.  That was over nine years ago.  He was a student at Stanford then and spent a summer vacation up here in the Cascades with a party of engineers who were running surveys for the Great Northern.  One day he was riding along a high ridge at the top of one of those arid gulfs, when he came to a bubbling spring.  It was so cool and pleasant up there above the desert heat that he set up a little camp of his own in the shade of some pine trees that rimmed the pool, and the rest of the season he rode to and from his work.  Then he began to see the possibilities of that alluvial pocket under irrigation, and before he went back to college he secured the quarter section.  That was his final year, and he expected to return the next summer and open the project.  But his whole future was changed by that unfortunate marriage.  His wife was not the kind of woman to follow him into the desert and share inevitable discomfort and hardship until his scheme should mature.  He began to plan a little Eden for her at the core, and to secure more capital he went to Alaska.  He hoped to make a rich strike and come back in a year or two with plenty of money to hurry the project through.  You know how near he came to it once, and why he failed.  And that was not the only time.  But every year he stayed in the north, his scheme took a stronger hold on him.  He used to spend long Arctic nights elaborating, making over his plans.  He thought and brooded on them so much that finally, when the end came, up there in the Chugach snows, he set up an orchard of spruce twigs—­”

“I know, I know,” interrupted Miss Armitage.  “Please don’t tell it over again.  I—­can’t—­bear it.”  And she sank against the back of the seat, shuddering, and covered her eyes with her hands.

Tisdale looked at her, puzzled.  “Again?” he repeated.  “But I see you must have heard the story through Mr. Feversham.  I told it at the clubhouse the night he was in Seattle.”

“It’s impossible to explain; you never could understand.”  She sat erect, but Tisdale felt her body tremble, and she went on swiftly, with little breaks and catches:  “You don’t know the hold your story has on me.  I’ve dreamed it all over at night; I’ve wakened cold and wet with perspiration from head to foot, as though I—­too—­were struggling through those frozen solitudes.  I’ve been afraid to sleep sometimes, the dread of facing—­it—­ is so strong.”

Watching her, a sudden tenderness rose through the wonder in Tisdale’s face.