It was a shock that roused him to a scared scrutiny of the future. He put questions to her for the purpose of drawing out her ideas, and her answers showed that all her thoughts and plans were gathering round the welfare of her baby. Her desire for its good was to end her unresisting subservience to him. She was thinking already of better things. Ambitions were awakened that would carry her out of the solitudes, where he felt himself at rest, back to the world where she would struggle to make a place for the child she had never wanted for herself. "We'll take him to San Francisco soon"--it was always "him" in her speculations--"We can't keep him here." "Why not?" he asked. "Look at Bella's children. Could anything be healthier and happier?" "Bella's children are different. Bella's different. She doesn't know anything better, she doesn't care. To have them well fed and healthy is enough for her. _We're_ not like that. _Our_ child's going to have everything." "You're content enough here by yourself and you're a different sort to Bella." "For myself!" she gave a shrug. "I don't care any more than Bella does. But for my child--my son--I want everything. Want him a gentleman like his ancestors, French and American"--she gave his arm a propitiating squeeze for she knew he disliked this kind of talk--"want him to be educated like my father, and know everything, and have a profession." "You're looking far ahead." "Years and years ahead," and then with deprecating eyes and irrepressible laughter, "Now don't say I'm foolish, but sometimes I think of him getting married and the kind of girl I'll choose for him--not stupid like me, but one who's good and beautiful and knows all about literature and geography and science. The finest girl in the world, and I'll find her for him." He didn't laugh, instead he looked sulkily thoughtful: "And where will we get the money to do all this?" "We'll make it. We have a good deal now. Daddy John told me the other day he thought we had nearly ten thousand dollars in dust beside what my father left. That will be plenty to begin on, and you can go into business down on the coast. They told Daddy John at the Fort there would be hundreds and thousands of people coming in next spring. They'll build towns, make Sacramento and San Francisco big places with lots going on. We can settle in whichever seems the most thriving and get back into the kind of life where we belong."