XXVII.

IRENE did not leave her mother in any illusion concerning her cousin

Will and herself. She said they had all been as nice to her as they

could be, and when Mrs. Lapham hinted at what had been in her

thoughts,--or her hopes, rather,--Irene severely snubbed the notion.

She said that he was as good as engaged to a girl out there, and that

he had never dreamt of her. Her mother wondered at her severity; in

these few months the girl had toughened and hardened; she had lost all

her babyish dependence and pliability; she was like iron; and here and

there she was sharpened to a cutting edge. It had been a life and

death struggle with her; she had conquered, but she had also

necessarily lost much. Perhaps what she had lost was not worth

keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.

She required from her mother a strict and accurate account of her

father's affairs, so far as Mrs Lapham knew them; and she showed a

business-like quickness in comprehending them that Penelope had never

pretended to. With her sister she ignored the past as completely as it

was possible to do; and she treated both Corey and Penelope with the

justice which their innocence of voluntary offence deserved. It was a

difficult part, and she kept away from them as much as she could. She

had been easily excused, on a plea of fatigue from her journey, when

Mr. and Mrs. Corey had called the day after her arrival, and Mrs.

Lapham being still unwell, Penelope received them alone.

The girl had instinctively judged best that they should know the worst

at once, and she let them have the full brunt of the drawing-room,

while she was screwing her courage up to come down and see them. She

was afterwards--months afterwards--able to report to Corey that when

she entered the room his father was sitting with his hat on his knees,

a little tilted away from the Emancipation group, as if he expected the

Lincoln to hit him, with that lifted hand of benediction; and that Mrs.

Corey looked as if she were not sure but the Eagle pecked. But for the

time being Penelope was as nearly crazed as might be by the

complications of her position, and received her visitors with a piteous

distraction which could not fail of touching Bromfield Corey's

Italianised sympatheticism. He was very polite and tender with her at

first, and ended by making a joke with her, to which Penelope

responded, in her sort. He said he hoped they parted friends, if not

quite acquaintances; and she said she hoped they would be able to

recognise each other if they ever met again.

"That is what I meant by her pertness," said Mrs Corey, when they were

driving away.

"Was it very pert?" he queried. "The child had to answer something."

"I would much rather she had answered nothing, under the

circumstances," said Mrs. Corey. "However!" she added hopelessly.

"Oh, she's a merry little grig, you can see that, and there's no harm

in her. I can understand a little why a formal fellow like Tom should

be taken with her. She hasn't the least reverence, I suppose, and

joked with the young man from the beginning. You must remember, Anna,

that there was a time when you liked my joking."

"It was a very different thing!"

"But that drawing-room," pursued Corey; "really, I don't see how Tom

stands that. Anna, a terrible thought occurs to me! Fancy Tom being

married in front of that group, with a floral horse-shoe in tuberoses

coming down on either side of it!"

"Bromfield!" cried his wife, "you are unmerciful."

"No, no, my dear," he argued; "merely imaginative. And I can even

imagine that little thing finding Tom just the least bit slow, at

times, if it were not for his goodness. Tom is so kind that I'm

convinced he sometimes feels your joke in his heart when his head isn't

quite clear about it. Well, we will not despond, my dear."

"Your father seemed actually to like her," Mrs. Corey reported to her

daughters, very much shaken in her own prejudices by the fact. If the

girl were not so offensive to his fastidiousness, there might be some

hope that she was not so offensive as Mrs. Corey had thought. "I

wonder how she will strike YOU," she concluded, looking from one

daughter to another, as if trying to decide which of them would like

Penelope least.

Irene's return and the visit of the Coreys formed a distraction for the

Laphams in which their impending troubles seemed to hang further aloof;

but it was only one of those reliefs which mark the course of

adversity, and it was not one of the cheerful reliefs. At any other

time, either incident would have been an anxiety and care for Mrs.

Lapham which she would have found hard to bear; but now she almost

welcomed them. At the end of three days Lapham returned, and his wife

met him as if nothing unusual had marked their parting; she reserved

her atonement for a fitter time; he would know now from the way she

acted that she felt all right towards him. He took very little note of

her manner, but met his family with an austere quiet that puzzled her,

and a sort of pensive dignity that refined his rudeness to an effect

that sometimes comes to such natures after long sickness, when the

animal strength has been taxed and lowered. He sat silent with her at

the table after their girls had left them alone, and seeing that he did

not mean to speak, she began to explain why Irene had come home, and to

praise her.

"Yes, she done right," said Lapham. "It was time for her to come," he

added gently.

Then he was silent again, and his wife told him of Corey's having been

there, and of his father's and mother's calling. "I guess Pen's

concluded to make it up," she said.

"Well, we'll see about that," said Lapham; and now she could no longer

forbear to ask him about his affairs.

"I don't know as I've got any right to know anything about it," she

said humbly, with remote allusion to her treatment of him. "But I

can't help wanting to know. How ARE things going, Si?"

"Bad," he said, pushing his plate from him, and tilting himself back in

his chair. "Or they ain't going at all. They've stopped."

"What do you mean, Si?" she persisted, tenderly.

"I've got to the end of my string. To-morrow I shall call a meeting of

my creditors, and put myself in their hands. If there's enough left to

satisfy them, I'm satisfied." His voice dropped in his throat; he

swallowed once or twice, and then did not speak.

"Do you mean that it's all over with you?" she asked fearfully.

He bowed his big head, wrinkled and grizzled; and after awhile he said,

"It's hard to realise it; but I guess there ain't any doubt about it."

He drew a long breath, and then he explained to her about the West

Virginia people, and how he had got an extension of the first time they

had given him, and had got a man to go up to Lapham with him and look

at the works,--a man that had turned up in New York, and wanted to put

money in the business. His money would have enabled Lapham to close

with the West Virginians. "The devil was in it, right straight along,"

said Lapham. "All I had to do was to keep quiet about that other

company. It was Rogers and his property right over again. He liked

the look of things, and he wanted to go into the business, and he had

the money--plenty; it would have saved me with those West Virginia

folks. But I had to tell him how I stood. I had to tell him all about

it, and what I wanted to do. He began to back water in a minute, and

the next morning I saw that it was up with him. He's gone back to New

York. I've lost my last chance. Now all I've got to do is to save the

pieces."

"Will--will--everything go?" she asked.

"I can't tell, yet. But they shall have a chance at everything--every

dollar, every cent. I'm sorry for you, Persis--and the girls."

"Oh, don't talk of US!" She was trying to realise that the simple, rude

soul to which her heart clove in her youth, but which she had put to

such cruel proof, with her unsparing conscience and her unsparing

tongue, had been equal to its ordeals, and had come out unscathed and

unstained. He was able in his talk to make so little of them; he

hardly seemed to see what they were; he was apparently not proud of

them, and certainly not glad; if they were victories of any sort, he

bore them with the patience of defeat. His wife wished to praise him,

but she did not know how; so she offered him a little reproach, in

which alone she touched the cause of her behaviour at parting.

"Silas," she asked, after a long gaze at him, "why didn't you tell me

you had Jim Millon's girl there?"

"I didn't suppose you'd like it, Persis," he answered. "I did intend

to tell you at first, but then I put--I put it off. I thought you'd

come round some day, and find it out for yourself."

"I'm punished," said his wife, "for not taking enough interest in your

business to even come near it. If we're brought back to the day of

small things, I guess it's a lesson for me, Silas."

"Oh, I don't know about the lesson," he said wearily.

That night she showed him the anonymous scrawl which had kindled her

fury against him. He turned it listlessly over in his hand. "I guess

I know who it's from," he said, giving it back to her, "and I guess you

do too, Persis."

"But how--how could he----"

"Mebbe he believed it," said Lapham, with patience that cut her more

keenly than any reproach. "YOU did."

Perhaps because the process of his ruin had been so gradual, perhaps

because the excitement of preceding events had exhausted their capacity

for emotion, the actual consummation of his bankruptcy brought a

relief, a repose to Lapham and his family, rather than a fresh

sensation of calamity. In the shadow of his disaster they returned to

something like their old, united life; they were at least all together

again; and it will be intelligible to those whom life has blessed with

vicissitude, that Lapham should come home the evening after he had

given up everything, to his creditors, and should sit down to his

supper so cheerful that Penelope could joke him in the old way, and

tell him that she thought from his looks they had concluded to pay him

a hundred cents on every dollar he owed them.

As James Bellingham had taken so much interest in his troubles from the

first, Lapham thought he ought to tell him, before taking the final

step, just how things stood with him, and what he meant to do.

Bellingham made some futile inquiries about his negotiations with the

West Virginians, and Lapham told him they had come to nothing. He

spoke of the New York man, and the chance that he might have sold out

half his business to him. "But, of course, I had to let him know how

it was about those fellows."

"Of course," said Bellingham, not seeing till afterwards the full

significance of Lapham's action.

Lapham said nothing about Rogers and the Englishmen. He believed that

he had acted right in that matter, and he was satisfied; but he did not

care to have Bellingham, or anybody, perhaps, think he had been a fool.

All those who were concerned in his affairs said he behaved well, and

even more than well, when it came to the worst. The prudence, the good

sense, which he had shown in the first years of his success, and of

which his great prosperity seemed to have bereft him, came back, and

these qualities, used in his own behalf, commended him as much to his

creditors as the anxiety he showed that no one should suffer by him;

this even made some of them doubtful of his sincerity. They gave him

time, and there would have been no trouble in his resuming on the old

basis, if the ground had not been cut from under him by the competition

of the West Virginia company. He saw himself that it was useless to

try to go on in the old way, and he preferred to go back and begin the

world anew where he had first begun it, in the hills at Lapham. He put

the house at Nankeen Square, with everything else he had, into the

payment of his debts, and Mrs. Lapham found it easier to leave it for

the old farmstead in Vermont than it would have been to go from that

home of many years to the new house on the water side of Beacon. This

thing and that is embittered to us, so that we may be willing to

relinquish it; the world, life itself, is embittered to most of us, so

that we are glad to have done with them at last; and this home was

haunted with such memories to each of those who abandoned it that to go

was less exile than escape. Mrs. Lapham could not look into Irene's

room without seeing the girl there before her glass, tearing the poor

little keep-sakes of her hapless fancy from their hiding-places to take

them and fling them in passionate renunciation upon her sister; she

could not come into the sitting-room, where her little ones had grown

up, without starting at the thought of her husband sitting so many

weary nights at his desk there, trying to fight his way back to hope

out of the ruin into which he was slipping. When she remembered that

night when Rogers came, she hated the place. Irene accepted her

release from the house eagerly, and was glad to go before and prepare

for the family at Lapham. Penelope was always ashamed of her

engagement there; it must seem better somewhere else and she was glad

to go too. No one but Lapham in fact, felt the pang of parting in all

its keenness. Whatever regret the others had was softened to them by

the likeness of their flitting to many of those removals for the summer

which they made in the late spring when they left Nankeen Square; they

were going directly into the country instead of to the seaside first;

but Lapham, who usually remained in town long after they had gone, knew

all the difference. For his nerves there was no mechanical sense of

coming back; this was as much the end of his proud, prosperous life as

death itself could have been. He was returning to begin life anew, but

he knew as well as he knew that he should not find his vanished youth

in his native hills, that it could never again be the triumph that it

had been. That was impossible, not only in his stiffened and weakened

forces, but in the very nature of things. He was going back, by grace

of the man whom he owed money, to make what he could out of the one

chance which his successful rivals had left him.

In one phase his paint had held its own against bad times and ruinous

competition, and it was with the hope of doing still more with the

Persis Brand that he now set himself to work. The West Virginia people

confessed that they could not produce those fine grades, and they

willingly left the field to him. A strange, not ignoble friendliness

existed between Lapham and the three brothers; they had used him

fairly; it was their facilities that had conquered him, not their

ill-will; and he recognised in them without enmity the necessity to

which he had yielded. If he succeeded in his efforts to develop his

paint in this direction, it must be for a long time on a small scale

compared with his former business, which it could never equal, and he

brought to them the flagging energies of an elderly man. He was more

broken than he knew by his failure; it did not kill, as it often does,

but it weakened the spring once so strong and elastic. He lapsed more

and more into acquiescence with his changed condition, and that

bragging note of his was rarely sounded. He worked faithfully enough

in his enterprise, but sometimes he failed to seize occasions that in

his younger days he would have turned to golden account. His wife saw

in him a daunted look that made her heart ache for him.

One result of his friendly relations with the West Virginia people was

that Corey went in with them, and the fact that he did so solely upon

Lapham's advice, and by means of his recommendation, was perhaps the

Colonel's proudest consolation. Corey knew the business thoroughly,

and after half a year at Kanawha Falls and in the office at New York,

he went out to Mexico and Central America, to see what could be done

for them upon the ground which he had theoretically studied with Lapham.

Before he went he came up to Vermont, and urged Penelope to go with

him. He was to be first in the city of Mexico, and if his mission was

successful he was to be kept there and in South America several years,

watching the new railroad enterprises and the development of mechanical

agriculture and whatever other undertakings offered an opening for the

introduction of the paint. They were all young men together, and

Corey, who had put his money into the company, had a proprietary

interest in the success which they were eager to achieve.

"There's no more reason now and no less than ever there was," mused

Penelope, in counsel with her mother, "why I should say Yes, or why I

should say No. Everything else changes, but this is just where it was a

year ago. It don't go backward, and it don't go forward. Mother, I

believe I shall take the bit in my teeth--if anybody will put it there!"

"It isn't the same as it was," suggested her mother. "You can see that

Irene's all over it."

"That's no credit to me," said Penelope. "I ought to be just as much

ashamed as ever."

"You no need ever to be ashamed."

"That's true, too," said the girl. "And I can sneak off to Mexico with

a good conscience if I could make up my mind to it." She laughed.

"Well, if I could be SENTENCED to be married, or somebody would up and

forbid the banns! I don't know what to do about it."

Her mother left her to carry her hesitation back to Corey, and she said

now, they had better go all over it and try to reason it out. "And I

hope that whatever I do, it won't be for my own sake, but for--others!"

Corey said he was sure of that, and looked at her with eyes of patient

tenderness.

"I don't say it is wrong," she proceeded, rather aimlessly, "but I

can't make it seem right. I don't know whether I can make you

understand, but the idea of being happy, when everybody else is so

miserable, is more than I can endure. It makes me wretched."

"Then perhaps that's your share of the common suffering," suggested

Corey, smiling.

"Oh, you know it isn't! You know it's nothing. Oh! One of the reasons

is what I told you once before, that as long as father is in trouble I

can't let you think of me. Now that he's lost everything--?" She bent

her eyes inquiringly upon him, as if for the effect of this argument.

"I don't think that's a very good reason," he answered seriously, but

smiling still. "Do you believe me when I tell you that I love you?"

"Why, I suppose I must," she said, dropping her eyes.

"Then why shouldn't I think all the more of you on account of your

father's loss? You didn't suppose I cared for you because he was

prosperous?"

There was a shade of reproach, ever so delicate and gentle, in his

smiling question, which she felt.

"No, I couldn't think such a thing of you. I--I don't know what I

meant. I meant that----" She could not go on and say that she had felt

herself more worthy of him because of her father's money; it would not

have been true; yet there was no other explanation. She stopped, and

cast a helpless glance at him.

He came to her aid. "I understand why you shouldn't wish me to suffer

by your father's misfortunes."

"Yes, that was it; and there is too great a difference every way. We

ought to look at that again. You mustn't pretend that you don't know

it, for that wouldn't be true. Your mother will never like me, and

perhaps--perhaps I shall not like her."

"Well," said Corey, a little daunted, "you won't have to marry my

family."

"Ah, that isn't the point!"

"I know it," he admitted. "I won't pretend that I don't see what you

mean; but I'm sure that all the differences would disappear when you

came to know my family better. I'm not afraid but you and my mother

will like each other--she can't help it!" he exclaimed, less judicially

than he had hitherto spoken, and he went on to urge some points of

doubtful tenability. "We have our ways, and you have yours; and while

I don't say but what you and my mother and sisters would be a little

strange together at first, it would soon wear off, on both sides.

There can't be anything hopelessly different in you all, and if there

were it wouldn't be any difference to me."

"Do you think it would be pleasant to have you on my side against your

mother?"

"There won't be any sides. Tell me just what it is you're afraid of."

"Afraid?"

"Thinking of, then."

"I don't know. It isn't anything they say or do," she explained, with

her eyes intent on his. "It's what they are. I couldn't be natural

with them, and if I can't be natural with people, I'm disagreeable."

"Can you be natural with me?"

"Oh, I'm not afraid of you. I never was. That was the trouble, from

the beginning."

"Well, then, that's all that's necessary. And it never was the least

trouble to me!"

"It made me untrue to Irene."

"You mustn't say that! You were always true to her."

"She cared for you first."

"Well, but I never cared for her at all!" he besought her.

"She thought you did."

"That was nobody's fault, and I can't let you make it yours. My

dear----"

"Wait. We must understand each other," said Penelope, rising from her

seat to prevent an advance he was making from his; "I want you to

realise the whole affair. Should you want a girl who hadn't a cent in

the world, and felt different in your mother's company, and had cheated

and betrayed her own sister?"

"I want you!"

"Very well, then, you can't have me. I should always despise myself.

I ought to give you up for all these reasons. Yes, I must." She looked

at him intently, and there was a tentative quality in her affirmations.

"Is this your answer?" he said. "I must submit. If I asked too much

of you, I was wrong. And--good-bye."

He held out his hand, and she put hers in it. "You think I'm

capricious and fickle!" she said. "I can't help it--I don't know

myself. I can't keep to one thing for half a day at a time. But it's

right for us to part--yes, it must be. It must be," she repeated; "and

I shall try to remember that. Good-bye! I will try to keep that in my

mind, and you will too--you won't care, very soon! I didn't mean

THAT--no; I know how true you are; but you will soon look at me

differently; and see that even IF there hadn't been this about Irene, I

was not the one for you. You do think so, don't you?" she pleaded,

clinging to his hand. "I am not at all what they would like--your

family; I felt that. I am little, and black, and homely, and they

don't understand my way of talking, and now that we've lost

everything--No, I'm not fit. Good-bye. You're quite right, not to have

patience with me any longer. I've tried you enough. I ought to be

willing to marry you against their wishes if you want me to, but I

can't make the sacrifice--I'm too selfish for that----" All at once she

flung herself on his breast. "I can't even give you up! I shall never

dare look any one in the face again. Go, go! But take me with you! I

tried to do without you! I gave it a fair trial, and it was a dead

failure. O poor Irene! How could she give you up?"

Corey went back to Boston immediately, and left Penelope, as he must,

to tell her sister that they were to be married. She was spared from

the first advance toward this by an accident or a misunderstanding.

Irene came straight to her after Corey was gone, and demanded,

"Penelope Lapham, have you been such a ninny as to send that man away

on my account?"

Penelope recoiled from this terrible courage; she did not answer

directly, and Irene went on, "Because if you did, I'll thank you to

bring him back again. I'm not going to have him thinking that I'm

dying for a man that never cared for me. It's insulting, and I'm not

going to stand it. Now, you just send for him!"

"Oh, I will, 'Rene," gasped Penelope. And then she added, shamed out

of her prevarication by Irene's haughty magnanimity, "I have. That

is--he's coming back----"

Irene looked at her a moment, and then, whatever thought was in her

mind, said fiercely, "Well!" and left her to her dismay--her dismay and

her relief, for they both knew that this was the last time they should

ever speak of that again.

The marriage came after so much sorrow and trouble, and the fact was

received with so much misgiving for the past and future, that it

brought Lapham none of the triumph in which he had once exulted at the

thought of an alliance with the Coreys. Adversity had so far been his

friend that it had taken from him all hope of the social success for

which people crawl and truckle, and restored him, through failure and

doubt and heartache, the manhood which his prosperity had so nearly

stolen from him. Neither he nor his wife thought now that their

daughter was marrying a Corey; they thought only that she was giving

herself to the man who loved her, and their acquiescence was sobered

still further by the presence of Irene. Their hearts were far more

with her.

Again and again Mrs. Lapham said she did not see how she could go

through it. "I can't make it seem right," she said.

"It IS right," steadily answered the Colonel.

"Yes, I know. But it don't SEEM so."

It would be easy to point out traits in Penelope's character which

finally reconciled all her husband's family and endeared her to them.

These things continually happen in novels; and the Coreys, as they had

always promised themselves to do, made the best, and not the worst of

Tom's marriage.

They were people who could value Lapham's behaviour as Tom reported it

to them. They were proud of him, and Bromfield Corey, who found a

delicate, aesthetic pleasure in the heroism with which Lapham had

withstood Rogers and his temptations--something finely dramatic and

unconsciously effective,--wrote him a letter which would once have

flattered the rough soul almost to ecstasy, though now he affected to

slight it in showing it. "It's all right if it makes it more

comfortable for Pen," he said to his wife.

But the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable, between

the Coreys and Tom Corey's wife. "If he had only married the Colonel!"

subtly suggested Nanny Corey.

There was a brief season of civility and forbearance on both sides,

when he brought her home before starting for Mexico, and her

father-in-law made a sympathetic feint of liking Penelope's way of

talking, but it is questionable if even he found it so delightful as

her husband did. Lily Corey made a little, ineffectual sketch of her,

which she put by with other studies to finish up, sometime, and found

her rather picturesque in some ways. Nanny got on with her better than

the rest, and saw possibilities for her in the country to which she was

going. "As she's quite unformed, socially," she explained to her

mother, "there is a chance that she will form herself on the Spanish

manner, if she stays there long enough, and that when she comes back

she will have the charm of, not olives, perhaps, but tortillas,

whatever they are: something strange and foreign, even if it's

borrowed. I'm glad she's going to Mexico. At that distance we

can--correspond."

Her mother sighed, and said bravely that she was sure they all got on

very pleasantly as it was, and that she was perfectly satisfied if Tom

was.

There was, in fact, much truth in what she said of their harmony with

Penelope. Having resolved, from the beginning, to make the best of the

worst, it might almost be said that they were supported and consoled in

their good intentions by a higher power. This marriage had not, thanks

to an over-ruling Providence, brought the succession of Lapham teas

upon Bromfield Corey which he had dreaded; the Laphams were far off in

their native fastnesses, and neither Lily nor Nanny Corey was obliged

to sacrifice herself to the conversation of Irene; they were not even

called upon to make a social demonstration for Penelope at a time when,

most people being still out of town, it would have been so easy; she

and Tom had both begged that there might be nothing of that kind; and

though none of the Coreys learned to know her very well in the week she

spent with them, they did not find it hard to get on with her. There

were even moments when Nanny Corey, like her father, had glimpses of

what Tom had called her humour, but it was perhaps too unlike their own

to be easily recognisable.

Whether Penelope, on her side, found it more difficult to harmonise, I

cannot say. She had much more of the harmonising to do, since they

were four to one; but then she had gone through so much greater trials

before. When the door of their carriage closed and it drove off with

her and her husband to the station, she fetched a long sigh.

"What is it?" asked Corey, who ought to have known better.

"Oh, nothing. I don't think I shall feel strange amongst the Mexicans

now."

He looked at her with a puzzled smile, which grew a little graver, and

then he put his arm round her and drew her closer to him. This made

her cry on his shoulder. "I only meant that I should have you all to

myself." There is no proof that she meant more, but it is certain that

our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities. The

price that we pay for civilisation is the fine yet impassable

differentiation of these. Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be

possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favour that

this is so. They may be right; and at any rate, the blank misgiving,

the recurring sense of disappointment to which the young people's

departure left the Coreys is to be considered. That was the end of

their son and brother for them; they felt that; and they were not mean

or unamiable people.

He remained three years away. Some changes took place in that time.

One of these was the purchase by the Kanawha Falls Company of the mines

and works at Lapham. The transfer relieved Lapham of the load of debt

which he was still labouring under, and gave him an interest in the

vaster enterprise of the younger men, which he had once vainly hoped to

grasp all in his own hand. He began to tell of this coincidence as

something very striking; and pushing on more actively the special

branch of the business left to him, he bragged, quite in his old way,

of its enormous extension. His son-in-law, he said, was pushing it in

Mexico and Central America: an idea that they had originally had in

common. Well, young blood was what was wanted in a thing of that kind.

Now, those fellows out in West Virginia: all young, and a perfect team!

For himself, he owned that he had made mistakes; he could see just

where the mistakes were--put his finger right on them. But one thing

he could say: he had been no man's enemy but his own; every dollar,

every cent had gone to pay his debts; he had come out with clean hands.

He said all this, and much more, to Mr. Sewell the summer after he sold

out, when the minister and his wife stopped at Lapham on their way

across from the White Mountains to Lake Champlain; Lapham had found

them on the cars, and pressed them to stop off.

There were times when Mrs. Lapham had as great pride in the

clean-handedness with which Lapham had come out as he had himself, but

her satisfaction was not so constant. At those times, knowing the

temptations he had resisted, she thought him the noblest and grandest

of men; but no woman could endure to live in the same house with a

perfect hero, and there were other times when she reminded him that if

he had kept his word to her about speculating in stocks, and had looked

after the insurance of his property half as carefully as he had looked

after a couple of worthless women who had no earthly claim on him, they

would not be where they were now. He humbly admitted it all, and left

her to think of Rogers herself. She did not fail to do so, and the

thought did not fail to restore him to her tenderness again.

I do not know how it is that clergymen and physicians keep from telling

their wives the secrets confided to them; perhaps they can trust their

wives to find them out for themselves whenever they wish. Sewell had

laid before his wife the case of the Laphams after they came to consult

with him about Corey's proposal to Penelope, for he wished to be

confirmed in his belief that he had advised them soundly; but he had

not given her their names, and he had not known Corey's himself. Now

he had no compunctions in talking the affair over with her without the

veil of ignorance which she had hitherto assumed, for she declared that

as soon as she heard of Corey's engagement to Penelope, the whole thing

had flashed upon her. "And that night at dinner I could have told the

child that he was in love with her sister by the way he talked about

her; I heard him; and if she had not been so blindly in love with him

herself, she would have known it too. I must say, I can't help feeling

a sort of contempt for her sister."

"Oh, but you must not!" cried Sewell. "That is wrong, cruelly wrong.

I'm sure that's out of your novel-reading, my dear, and not out of your

heart. Come! It grieves me to hear you say such a thing as that."

"Oh, I dare say this pretty thing has got over it--how much character

she has got!--and I suppose she'll see somebody else."

Sewell had to content himself with this partial concession. As a

matter of fact, unless it was the young West Virginian who had come on

to arrange the purchase of the Works, Irene had not yet seen any one,

and whether there was ever anything between them is a fact that would

need a separate inquiry. It is certain that at the end of five years

after the disappointment which she met so bravely, she was still

unmarried. But she was even then still very young, and her life at

Lapham had been varied by visits to the West. It had also been varied

by an invitation, made with the politest resolution by Mrs. Corey, to

visit in Boston, which the girl was equal to refusing in the same

spirit.

Sewell was intensely interested in the moral spectacle which Lapham

presented under his changed conditions. The Colonel, who was more the

Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay,

kept him and Mrs. Sewell over night at his house; and he showed the

minister minutely round the Works and drove him all over his farm. For

this expedition he employed a lively colt which had not yet come of

age, and an open buggy long past its prime, and was no more ashamed of

his turnout than of the finest he had ever driven on the Milldam. He

was rather shabby and slovenly in dress, and he had fallen unkempt,

after the country fashion, as to his hair and beard and boots. The

house was plain, and was furnished with the simpler moveables out of

the house in Nankeen Square. There were certainly all the necessaries,

but no luxuries unless the statues of Prayer and Faith might be so

considered. The Laphams now burned kerosene, of course, and they had

no furnace in the winter; these were the only hardships the Colonel

complained of; but he said that as soon as the company got to paying

dividends again,--he was evidently proud of the outlays that for the

present prevented this,--he should put in steam heat and naphtha-gas.

He spoke freely of his failure, and with a confidence that seemed

inspired by his former trust in Sewell, whom, indeed, he treated like

an intimate friend, rather than an acquaintance of two or three

meetings. He went back to his first connection with Rogers, and he put

before Sewell hypothetically his own conclusions in regard to the

matter.

"Sometimes," he said, "I get to thinking it all over, and it seems to

me I done wrong about Rogers in the first place; that the whole trouble

came from that. It was just like starting a row of bricks. I tried to

catch up and stop 'em from going, but they all tumbled, one after

another. It wa'n't in the nature of things that they could be stopped

till the last brick went. I don't talk much with my wife, any more

about it; but I should like to know how it strikes you."

"We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world," replied the

minister, "but I'm more and more puzzled about it in the moral world.

There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to

involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatever. And in your own

case, as I understand, you don't admit--you don't feel sure--that you

ever actually did wrong this man----"

"Well, no; I don't. That is to say----"

He did not continue, and after a while Sewell said, with that subtle

kindness of his, "I should be inclined to think--nothing can be thrown

quite away; and it can't be that our sins only weaken us--that your

fear of having possibly behaved selfishly toward this man kept you on

your guard, and strengthened you when you were brought face to face

with a greater"--he was going to say temptation, but he saved Lapham's

pride, and said--"emergency."

"Do you think so?"

"I think that there may be truth in what I suggest."

"Well, I don't know what it was," said Lapham; "all I know is that when

it came to the point, although I could see that I'd got to go under

unless I did it--that I couldn't sell out to those Englishmen, and I

couldn't let that man put his money into my business without I told him

just how things stood."

As Sewell afterwards told his wife, he could see that the loss of his

fortune had been a terrible trial to Lapham, just because his

prosperity had been so gross and palpable; and he had now a burning

desire to know exactly how, at the bottom of his heart, Lapham still

felt. "And do you ever have any regrets?" he delicately inquired of

him.

"About what I done? Well, it don't always seem as if I done it,"

replied Lapham. "Seems sometimes as if it was a hole opened for me,

and I crept out of it. I don't know," he added thoughtfully, biting

the corner of his stiff moustache. "I don't know as I should always

say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again,

right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it."