"Too late!" She shivered. A specter rose before her that she had seen before--hard-featured, domineering, unloved, unloving, chafing in ghastly solitude, alone with her sheep and her money, and the best years of her life behind her. She saw herself as her work and her thoughts would make her. For an instant she wavered. If Disston had known, he might have swayed her then, but, since he could not, he only said with an effort: "If your love for me isn't big enough to make you abandon this purpose, I shan't urge you. I know it would be useless. You have a strange nature, Kate--a mixture of steel and velvet, of wormwood and honey." Absorbed in the swiftly moving panorama that was passing before her, she scarcely heard him. She was gazing at a bizarre figure in a wreath of paper roses trip down a staircase, radiant and eager--to be greeted by mocking eyes and unsuppressed titters; at a crowded courtroom, staring mercilessly, tense, with unfriendly curiosity; at Neifkins with his insolent stare, his skin, red, shiny, stretched to cracking across his broad, square-jawed face; at Wentz, listening in cold amusement to a frightened, tremulous voice pleading for leniency; at a sallow face with dead brown eyes leering through a cloud of smoke, suggesting in contemptuous familiarity, "Why don't you fade away--open a dance hall in some live burg and get a liquor license?"; at Mrs. Toomey, pinched with worry and malnutrition, a look of craven cowardice in her blue eyes, blurting out in the candor of desperation, "Your friendship might hurt us in our business!" She saw it all--figures and episodes passed in review before her, even to irrelevant details, and each contributed its weight to turn the scales in this crisis. "It's the fork of the road," she said in curt decision, "and I've chosen." There was something so implacable in her face and voice and manner that Disston felt like one shut out behind a door that is closed and bolted; he had a sensation as though his heart while warm and beating had been laid upon the unresponsive surface of cold marble. The chill of it went all through him. With another woman than Kate he might still have argued. But he could only look at her sorrowfully: "When you are older, and have grown more tolerant and forgiving, I'm afraid you will find that you have chosen wrongly." "If ever I should grow tolerant and forgiving," she cried fiercely, "then I will have failed miserably." CHAPTER XXI "HEART AND HAND" "Come in, Bowers." Kate looked up from the market report she was reading as her trusted lieutenant scraped his feet on the soap box which did duty as a step to the tongue of the sheep wagon. After a final glance at the report, during which Bowers eyed the mail sack with interest, she folded the sheet and turned to him inquiringly. "I wisht you'd order some turpentine--'bout two quarts of it," he said. "What do you want with so much?" She reached for a pad and pencil to make a note.