"Gordon," Lettice said, in a small, strained voice. Apparently he had not heard her. "Gordon," she repeated more loudly. She had dropped the piece of sewing, her hands were clenched, her face wet and pallid. "Gordon!" she cried, her voice cutting through the sound of the phonograph and the howling dog; "stop it, do you hear! I'll go crazy! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" He silenced the machine in genuine surprise. "Why, everything works you up to-night. I thought you'd like to hear General Jackson sing; he's got a real deep barytone." Lettice sat limply in her chair. "I stood it just as long as I could," she half whispered. Gordon walked to the unshuttered window, gazing out; above the impenetrable, velvety dark of the western range the stars gleamed like drops of water. He felt unsettled, ill at ease; dissatisfaction irked his thoughts and emotions. His unrest was without tangible features; it permeated him from an undivined cause, oppressed him with indefinable longing. He got, he dimly realized, but a limited amount of satisfaction from the money now at his command. He was totally without financial instinct--money for itself, the abstraction, was beyond his comprehension. He had bought a ponderous gold watch, which he continually neglected to wind; the years of stage driving had sated him of horses; his clothes were already a subject of jest in Greenstream; and he had seriously damaged his throat, and the throat of Sim Caley, with cigars. He had been glad to return to the familiar, casual cigarettes, the generous bag of Green Goose for five cents; Sim had reverted to his haggled plug. He had no desire to build a pretentious dwelling--his instinct, his clannish spirit, was too closely bound up in the house of his father and grandfather to derive any pleasure from that. After he had spent a limited amount, the principal at his disposal lay untouched, unrealized. He got a certain measure of content from its sheer bulk at his back; it ministered to his vanity, to his supreme self importance. He liked negligently to produce, in Simmons' store, a twenty or even fifty dollar currency note, and then conduct a search through his pockets for something smaller. He drank an adequate amount of whiskey, receiving it in jugs semi-surreptitiously by way of the Stenton stage; Greenstream County was "dry," but whiskey in gallons was comparatively inexpensive. He would have gambled, but two dollars was a momentous hazard to the habitual card players of the village. He thought, occasionally, of taking a short trip, of two or three days, to nearby cities outside his ken, or to the ocean--Gordon had never seen a large body of water; but his life had travelled such a narrow course, he was so accustomed by blood and experience to the feel of the mountains, that, when the moment arrived to consider an actual departure, he drew back ... put it off.