When she had fled to the west, it had seemed to her simply in reaction to the instinct for the refuge of "home"; but now that flight had assumed another object which was to preserve, even by the acceptance and use of Uncle Lucas's willing loans, what had been her father's and cousin Agnes's interest in the western properties. Not for her own sake but for Barney! For she knew that either he would find out some time that he was cousin Agnes's son, or she would tell him. She would give him, she planned, also her father's interest. She never said to herself "his" father's; consciously she always refused that; yet she found herself habitually acting as though she had accepted her grandfather's statement entire.
Her Uncle Lucas, of course, learned that the funds, which he had insisted upon forwarding, were being used and, upon one of the rare occasions when a leisure hour at home coincided with his father's, Luke duly reported that fact.
"Ethel seems to be making the grand tour of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho water powers," he said. "The busiest little business woman in the west. You certainly brought her to her senses," Luke admitted ungrudgingly the amazing effect of his father's single interview with Ethel when all the rest of the family had failed. "What did you say to her?"
Lucas had never told; and he only looked knowing.
"When I saw Jaccard to-day, after he'd seen you, he looked," Luke continued, abandoning that quest, "like a cat who'd eaten the canary. What are—" Luke was continuing, but his father had jerked queerly. Lucas did not like to hear about canaries or talk of them since Kincheloe's death; but he could not explain that to Luke.
