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Updated: September 17, 2025
And there began at Highcourt a régime of retrenchment, bitterly fought by Adelle the rich man's poverty where there is no actual want, but a series of petty curtailments and borrowings and sometimes a real shortness of cash, almost as squalid as the commoner sort of poverty.
"Don't you know who I am?" "Yes," the mason called back over his shoulder. "You're the boss up there." He indicated the unfinished house with a wave of his trowel, and went on with his work. He seemed indifferent to the fact that he was dealing with the mistress of Highcourt, and Adelle helplessly retreated. "I will have you discharged!" she said as she walked away.
And then one morning, as she was passing heedlessly along the terrace, she heard a man's voice which was familiar, and peering over the great wall, saw Tom Clark below at his accustomed post. He caught sight of the mistress of Highcourt, and bobbed his head shamefacedly. After a time she came to him through the cañon, but he pretended not to see her.
The mason stimulated the mistress of Highcourt intellectually and spiritually, which would have made the good ladies at luncheon with her that day laugh or do worse. Adelle felt that he could help her to understand many things that she was beginning to think about, that were stirring in her dumb soul and troubling her.
Evidently the young man was attached to his beautiful solitary abode he had planted and watered a vine for the door. She resolved to tell him that he could help himself to the fruit and flowers in Highcourt. If he cared to set out a small flower garden, he could get seeds and slips from her own formal garden.
But she had almost daily opportunity for talk with the young mason in the succeeding weeks, for after his return from his spree, he worked steadily on his job every day. He was one of the very few American-born workmen employed at Highcourt, and after their misunderstanding and subsequent agreement, Adelle felt better acquainted with him than with the others.
She liked to stare up at it as she liked to see great trees or massive mountains or tall buildings. It was a symbol of something humanly important which supplied a secret craving in her soul. So this morning she stood silently watching the masons at their slow work. One of the men she recognized as having been steadily on the job ever since her arrival at Highcourt.
She had not thought about him at all since she had dropped him so summarily from her life after the fire at Highcourt. She wrote him finally a considerable letter, in which she made plain the results of her thinking. It was a surprising letter, as Archie felt, not only in length, but in its point of view and its kindly tone. She seemed to see the great wrong she had ignorantly done to him.
And the workman whom he had insulted and discharged in his fury was really his superior, in money as well as character, and might perhaps drive him out of Highcourt, instead! But she decided to put off this ironical blow until a more opportune time, when Archie was nagging her for money. He could be too disagreeable in his present state.
She had to will deliberately not to take the little path up the hill to the mason's shack. Once she yielded, and when she arrived breathless, her heart thumping, she found the door safely padlocked. The mason had gone to the town for supplies. She sneaked back to Highcourt by a roundabout course through the eucalyptus wood, to avoid meeting her cousin on the path.
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