Weston’s excellent qualities were well known to me.  I had discovered them long ago, and I did not care to hear Mary descant on them at length.  He had done much for Tim, but it was what Tim had done for himself that I was proud of, so I interrupted her rather rudely.

“Yes, he got Tim his place; but you must remember Mr. Weston has hardly been in New York a day since the boy left.  He doesn’t bother much about business, so, after all, Tim is working his way alone.”

“Yes,” said Mary.  She had missed a stitch somewhere, and it irritated her greatly.  That was evident by the way she picked at it.  She remedied the trouble somehow, recovered her composure, and went on knitting.

“Is it eight dollars he is making, did you say?” she asked.

“Yes, eight,” I replied, verifying the figure with a glance at the letter.

“A week or a month?”

“A week.  Just think of it—­that is more than I got in the army.”

But Mary was not a bit impressed.  I remembered that she came from Kansas, and in Kansas a dollar is not so big as in our valley.

“Living is so expensive in the city,” she said absently.  “With eight dollars a week here Tim would be a millionaire.  But in New York—­” A shrug of the shoulder expressed her meaning.

“True,” said I, a bit ruefully.

I had expected her to clasp her hands, to look up at me and listen to my stories of Tim’s success, and hear my dreams for his future.  Instead, she went on knitting, never once raising her eyes to me.  It exasperated me.  In sheer chagrin I took to silence and smoking.  But she would not let me rest long this way, though I was slowly lulling myself into a state of semi-coma, of indifference to her and calm disdain.

“Of course Tim has made some friends,” she said, glancing up from her work very casually.

“Of course he has,” I snapped.

“That’s nice,” she murmured—­knitting, knitting, knitting.

I expected her to ask who his friends were, and how he had made them.  That was all in the letter.  Moreover, it was in the part I had not read to her.  But she abruptly abandoned this line of inquiry.  She did not care.  She let me smoke on.

Suddenly she dropped her work and asked, “Is that a footstep on the porch?”

“Footsteps!  No—­why, who did you think was coming?” I said.

“Mr. Weston promised to drop in on his way home from hunting—­but I guess he’ll disappoint me.  I hoped it was he.”  She fell to her task again, only now she began to hum softly, thus shutting me off entirely.

For a very long while I endured it, but the time came when action of some kind was called for.  We were not married, that I could sit forever smoking while she hummed.  Even in Black Log, etiquette requires that a man talk to a woman when in her company; and when the woman ceases to listen, the wise man departs.  That was just what I did not want to do, and only one alternative was left me.  I got out the letter and held it under the light.