“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Addie sobbed.

Paul’s arm came round her, he grinned fondly down at the distraught face. “Yes you do, Addie. You’re just playing dumb. Remember what the writer said—I’ve forgotten his name—but he said: ‘You can’t go on the street to earn a trousseau.’ ”

15

IT WAS JUNE. Three months of Arctic summer, three months of daylight twenty-four hours around the clock before the wintry autumn came. The rapier rays of the constant sun forced every growing thing into fabulous maturity. A month ago there was ice on the rivers and lakes and inlet. Now they were merry with the shouts of swimmers. The cabbages, the roses, the rhubarb, the delphinium seemed to spring overnight (or overday) from seed or bulb to full-grown product. Christine Storm, too, in those blindingly brilliant months, emerged from the chrysalis of girlhood into womanhood.

“In a way, then,” Thor had said that first week in June, “these next two years belong to me, so far as Chris’s education is concerned. In a way.”

The two men were conferring warily in Czar’s little private apartment on the top floor of the Lode Building. No one would disturb them there; no cat-footed Gus, as at Czar’s house; no Bridie bursting volubly into a meeting planned without her; no Chris sauntering in with a fondly amused, “What are you two evil guardians plotting against your defenseless grandchild?”

“In a way?” Czar repeated Thor’s words. His gaze was directed coldly past and beyond Thor, as though surveying with distaste the two years that lay in the future. “I can’t see that. In what way?”

Quietly, patiently, Thor reviewed the facts so well known to both.

“We know she’s going to be at Baranof College for two years. That was what I had hoped. Christine had decided that for herself. I was pleased, naturally. It’s understood. So nothing has to be settled about that.”

“Nothing?”

“Of course there’s her tuition and her other expenses. They’ll be paid by me. If she prefers to live out at the college I’ll pay her board and room at the dormitory.”

“Dormitory!” Now at last Czar turned his gaze full on the other. His eyes were agate.

“When she goes to Seattle two years from now she’ll be on her own. Those are your two years. It may be that here at school in Baranof, too, she’d like to be free of two old men.”

“Free of two old men!” Czar shouted.

Now Thor broke into a roar of laughter. He threw back his fine head, the blue eyes all but disappeared behind the lines etched at the temples. He wiped his eyes while Czar glared. “Sorry. But perhaps you don’t realize that for the past five minutes you’ve been repeating the tag end of every sentence I’ve uttered. Like an echo.” Now he threatened to burst into laughter again, but controlled himself.

“Very funny.” Icy cold, unsmiling. “Am I to understand you are planning to have my granddaughter live at a college dormitory here in Baranof! When all her life her home has been the finest house in town!”