Now Hester and Rhoda had left behind such purely imaginative games, and Jem was away fishing on the Georges Bank; her duty and worries had shifted, but not lessened; while the rock remained precisely as it had been through the children's growth, as it had appeared in her own earliest memories, as it was before ever the Stanes dwelling, now a hundred and fifty years in place, or old Cottarsport itself, had been dreamed of. Her thoughts were mixed: at once they created a vague parallel between the granite in the side yard and herself, Olive Stanes--they both seemed to have been so long in one spot, so unchanged; and they dwelt on the fact that soon--as soon as Jason Burrage got home--she must be utterly different. Jason had written her that, if they cared to, they could build a house as large as the Canderays'. Under the circumstances she had been obliged to look on that as, perhaps, an excusable exaggeration, though she instinctively condemned the dereliction of the truth; yet, more than any other figure could possibly have done, it impressed upon her, from the boldness of the imagery, that Jason had succeeded in finding the gold for which he had gone in search nine years before. He was coming back, soon, rich. The other important fact reiterated in his last letter, that in all his absent years of struggle he had never faltered in his purpose of coming to her with any fortune he might chance to get, she regarded with scant thought. It had not occurred to Olive that Jason Burrage would do anything else; her only concern had been that he might be killed; otherwise he had said that he loved her, and that they were to marry when he returned. She hadn't, really, been in favor of his going. The Burrages, measured by Cottarsport standards, were comfortably situated--Mr. Burrage's packing warehouse and employment in dried fish were locally called successful--but Jason had never been satisfied with familiar values; he had always exclaimed against the narrowness of his local circumstance, and restlessly reached toward greater possessions and a wider horizon. This dissatisfaction Olive had thought wicked, in that it had seemed to criticize the omnipotent and far-seeing wisdom of the Eternal; it had caused her much unhappiness and prayer, she had talked very earnestly to Jason about his stubborn spirit, but it had persisted in him, and at last carried him west in the first madness of the discovery of gold in a California river. Olive, at times, thought that Jason's revolt had been brought about by the visible example of the worldly pomp of the Canderays--of their great white house with the balustraded captain's walk on the gambreled roof, their chaise, and equable but slightly disconcerting courtesy. But she had been obliged to admit that, after all was said, Jason's bearing was the result of his own fretful heart.