He was going on that afternoon to explain to me how, in a marriage free from the disturbances of passion incidental to temperamental matings, I should be at ease to give myself wholly to the business of book-making. With all his understanding, Herman was fully possessed of that Academic notion that literature can be produced by taking pains instead of having them. He was very patient with me through it all, crediting my indifference to overwork and to nerves, as a man does with a woman when he is at a loss to know what is the matter with her. The truth was, if I was tired of anything, it was of being the very things Herman most admired in me. I was growing every moment more exasperated. By the time he had got to the point of wanting to know what more there was that he could say, I had reached the pitch of replying that there could be nothing more unless he wished to say the usual thing. “And that?” He turned to me with a sincere and astonished inquiry in his lifted brows. “Would be merely that you love me and can’t live without me.” “Oh, if you want me to say what the grocer’s man says to the cook in the kitchen!”—he flushed—“but you know very well, Mona, that I am not going to insult your intelligence and mine with the clap-trap of passion. Certainly I’ve no such cheap sort of feeling for you, and I’m not such an infernal cad as to suppose you have——Mona?” It might have been the wind that blew from the country beyond Broken Tree at that moment, or something in my face, that turned that last repetition of my name upon the point of interrogation. Though it was my crying objection to Herman that he could not produce in me those raptures and alarms and whirlings to and fro, out of which I knew all creative art to proceed, yet to have him so renounce for us both the possibility of such a relation filled me with sudden wounding and affront. And at that, or at some new shadow of wonder in his eyes with the turning of his voice upon the word, I found myself so little able to give back look for look, that it was a great relief to me to discover the hawk’s nest in the Broken Tree. The creek makes a turn here, and the stepping-stones were so far apart it was necessary for Herman to go ahead and reach me back his hand. As I swung past him I heard him say my name again with so new a touch of shamed credulity that I was glad to put my hand up over my eyes, making believe I had not heard him, and look very attentively at Broken Tree. It stands on the upper bank of the creek, snapped off midway by the wind. Below the break two great sweeping boughs spread either way like the arms of a guide-post. The nest is in the splintered hollow of the trunk.