University of Virginia Library

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 aceurate
account of her father's affairs, so far as Mrs
Lapham knew them; and she showed a businesslike
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 a while 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 keepsakes
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 is n'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 should n't I think all the more of you
on account of your father's loss? You did n'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. Goodbye!
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 mis
giving 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, æsthetic 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 overruling
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 wan'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."