Mrs. Milton Caukins, their neighbor in the stone house across the bridge over the Rothel, stood for several minutes at her back door listening to Champney's continued arpeggios and wondered whose was the deep hearty laugh that answered them. In telling his afternoon's experience Champney, also, had his reserves: of the coming serenade he said never a word to the priest. "He's O.K. and a man, mother," was his comment on their guest, as he bade her good night. Aurora Googe answered him with a smile that betokened content, but she was wise enough not to commit herself in words. Afterwards she sat long in her room, planning for her son's future. The twenty thousand she had just received for the undeveloped quarry lands should serve to start him well in life. VII On the following day, mother and son constituted themselves a committee of ways and means as to the best investment of the money in furtherance of Champney's interests. Her ambition was gratified in that she saw him anxious to take his place in the world of affairs, to "get on" and, as he said, make his mark early in the world of finance. The fact that, during his college course, he had spent the five thousand received from the sale of the first quarry, plus the interest on the same without accounting for a penny of it, seemed to his mother perfectly legitimate; for she had sold the land and laid by the amount paid for it in order to put her son through college. Since he was twelve years old she had brought him up in the knowledge that it was to be his for that purpose. From the time he came, through her generosity, into possession of the property, she always replied to those who had the courage to criticise her course in placing so large a sum at the disposal of a youth: "My son is a man. I realize I can suggest, but not dictate; moreover I have no desire to." She drew the line there, and rarely had any one dared to expostulate further with her. When they ventured it, Aurora Googe turned upon them those dark eyes, in which at such times there burned a seemingly unquenchable light of self-feeding defiance, and gave them to understand, with a repelling dignity of manner that bordered hard on haughtiness, that what she and her son might or might not do was no one's concern but their own. This self-evident truth, when it struck home to her well-wishers, made her no friends. Nor did she regret this. She had dwelt, as it were, apart, since her marriage and early widowhood--her husband had died seven months before Champney was born--on the old Googe estate at The Gore. But she was a good neighbor, as Mrs. Caukins could testify; paid her taxes promptly, and minded her flocks, the source of her limited income, until wool-raising in New England became unprofitable. An opportunity was presented when her boy was ten years old to sell a portion of the barren sheep pastures for the first quarry. She counted herself fortunate in being able thus to provide for Champney's four college years.