"Then came Alice, and I knew _that_ wouldn't do. It would make blackmail too easy. I was base enough to think of that. "After Jack's wedding I gave the whole thing some serious thought. I surmised how the land lay between you and Jean, and what had interrupted your plans. I concluded that the only decent thing to do was to drop out of your lives, for the time being. Well, Jean wouldn't have it. You know--the other day. . . . That was one of the hard things I was thinking about when I spoke of them a moment ago. "Frank, she lit a thousand old fires of memory that morning. Moving about in my room; sitting at my table; pouring my tea--God, man, do you understand? It was too much for anybody. . . . I don't know what would have happened. At any rate, I ask you to believe that I was making my fight. . . . . Then you came." He threw away half of an unsmoked cigarette and rolled another. "Then I spent some sleepless nights, Frank, old boy. I was glad you had come, and even in my gladness for that sometimes I wished you--We humans are such queer mixtures; beyond analysis. But the more I admitted these things to myself the more I had also to admit that something might be said for Alice. Alice had once been to me all that it now seemed that Jean might be. I wondered if, by some miracle, that might not come again. Wasn't the obstacle, all the obstacle, the only obstacle, right in my own mind? What if I should root it out? What if I should say, 'I'm too big a man to submit to this; I refuse to be tyrannized by a little jealous demon in one corner of my mind?' . . . "I began to think that perhaps after all Alice's purpose in following me here was quite different from what I had suspected. Women are strange creatures. They keep you guessing, as you say in this country." "Better that than boredom," I heard my own voice saying. "Shake!" said Spoof, springing suddenly to his feet and seizing me by the hand. "Shake! By Jove, I didn't know it was in you. If I were a moralist, setting light houses on the reefs about the sea of matrimony, I would set the biggest, blazingest light on Boredom. But nobody set a light on it for me . . . "Besides, I wanted tremendously to see the boy. "So yesterday I hitched the oxen and broke trail over to 'Widow Alton's.' My afflictions had brought me to a sufficiently humble frame of mind to let Alice say her say. For awhile she couldn't say anything; just wept, you know, and cried my name over and over, and sometimes Gerald's. Mighty uncomfortable for a man standing around and feeling that in some way he's to blame for it all.