Mary tightened her hold on the boy’s arm.  “I’ve been so afraid!  So afraid!  And no one to talk to!”

“Haven’t you ever warned Jude about it?” demanded Douglas, with a sudden sensing of a debt mothers owed to daughters that Mary might not be discharging.

Mary shrank.  “O, I couldn’t, Doug!”

Douglas looked at her scornfully.  “I don’t see why that isn’t your job.”

Mary rose from her knees.  She twisted her work-scarred hands together and looked at the boy with pathetic wistfulness.

“Don’t you see, Doug, that I couldn’t make her understand?  She’s still such a child she’d just laugh at me.”

“Child!” scoffed Douglas, forgetting his own previous estimate of Judith.  “She knows a whole lot more than you do!”

Mary laughed drearily.  “Now you’re talking like a child!” Then her voice cleared with unwonted purposefulness.  “No one who hasn’t been married can possibly understand men, or fear them or despise them, like they ought to be feared and despised.  When I think what I was before I married and what I am now, I feel like I wanted to put Judith where she never could see a man.  It’s not right that a woman should suffer so.  It’s not right to lose all your dreams like I’ve lost mine.  Marriage was never meant to be so.”

Douglas scowled in his astonishment.  Mary had been feeling like this all along when he’d been thinking of her as without nerve!  Here, then, was somebody else lonely, like himself and Judith.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” he said awkwardly.  “I’ll do what I can to change it.”

“You can’t do anything, my dear.  What I’m suffering is in the nature of things.”

“Well, anyhow, you ought to warn Jude,” repeated Douglas.

“I can’t!” said Mary.  “Doug, if I do she’d guess how cowardly I am and how I suffer—­in my mind, I mean,” and she put her hands over her face with a dry sob.

Douglas put his long young arm about her.  “I’ll take care of it for you,” he said huskily.  “Judith don’t know it but she’s got somebody besides old Peter ridin’ herd on her now.  And you know I’m some little old herder, Mother!”

“I know you’re a man!” exclaimed Mary.  “The kind of a man that’s mighty scarce in Lost Chief Valley.”  She turned away toward the house.

Douglas picked a bridle from the fence and started after Buster.

It was nearly supper time and Doug and his father were reading in the living-room when Judith returned.  The wind had risen and fine particles of snow sifted under the eaves and over the table.  The wood stove glowed red hot and the smell of cedar mingled with that of frying beef in the kitchen.

Judith, without waiting to take off her mackinaw, cheeks scarlet, eyes brilliant, stood before her father.

“Here I am, Dad.”

John looked up from his book.  “Have you milked yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Go out and do it.”