Fred looked after her, still smiling oddly because he had known so well how to persuade her to go back to the house and help Kate.  Fred almost loved Marion Rose.  He admitted to himself that he almost loved her—­which is going pretty far for a man like Fred Humphrey.  But he also admitted to himself that she could not make him happy, nor he her.  To make Marion happy he believed that he would need to have about a million dollars to spend.  To make him happy, Marion would need to take a little more interest in home making and not so much interest in beauty making.  The frivolous vanity bag of hers, and her bland way of using it, like the movie actresses, in public, served to check his imagination before it actually began building air-castles wherein she reigned the queen.

He could have loved her so faithfully if only she were a little different!  The nearest he came to building an air-castle was when he was lying luxuriously in a shallow part of the pool, where the water was not so cold.

“She’d be different, I believe—­I’d make her different if I could just have her to myself,” he mused.  “I’d take a lot of that foolishness out of her in a little while, and I wouldn’t have to be rough with her, either.  All she needs is a man she can’t bluff!”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

JACK SHOULD HAVE A HIDE-OUT

Kate, like the rest of the world, pretended to herself a good deal.  For instance, when she came into the mountains, she had hoped that Fred and Marion would fall in love and get married.  She felt that the arrangement would be perfectly ideal in every way.  Marion was such a dear girl, so sweet-tempered and light-hearted; just the temperament that Fred needed in a wife, to save him from becoming mentally heavy and stolid and too unemotional.  Fred was so matter-of-fact!  Her eagerness to have Marion come into the mining-claim scheme had not been altogether a friendly desire for companionship, as she pretended.  Deep in the back of her mind was the matchmaker’s belief that propinquity would prove a mighty factor in bringing these two together in marriage.  If they did marry, that would throw Marion’s timber land with Fred’s and give Fred a good bit more than he would have with his own claim alone, which was another reason why Kate had considered their marriage an ideal arrangement.

Three weeks had changed Kate’s desire, however.  Three weeks is a long time for two women to spend in one small cabin together with almost no intercourse with the outside world.  Little by little, Kate’s opinion of Marion had changed considerably.  To go to shows with Marion, to have her at the house for dinner and to spend a night now and then, to lie relaxed upon a cot in the Martha Washington’s beauty booth while Marion ministered to her with soothing fingertips and agreeable chatter, was one thing; to live uncomfortably—­albeit picturesquely—­with Marion in a log cabin in the woods was quite another thing.