"Carleton was rather decent, so far as that part of it was concerned, and insisted on paying him a fair price.

The market value would have been much less; and he wanted to be out of it." Joan remained silent.

It made her mad, that a man could be suddenly robbed of fifteen years' labour: the weapon that his heart and brain had made keen wrested from his hand by a legal process, and turned against the very principles for which all his life he had been fighting.
"I'm almost more sorry for myself than for him," said Mary, making a whimsical grimace.

"He will start something else, so soon as he's got over his first soreness; but I'm too old to dream of another child." He came in a little later and, seating himself between them, filled and lighted his pipe.

Looking back, Joan remembered that curiously none of them had spoken.