"Somehow," he resumed, "it was all of a piece, dirty work. Everything I had touched, pretty nearly, since I had started, seemed rotten. It made me sick all over. . . . Well, that was the end! I went to Everett and tried to square the school matter as well as I could. I gave him all I had made out of it and more,about every dollar I had. It leaves us where we started. But, Nell, I knew you would want me to do that first before I came here!"

He was glad that he could give her this proof of his sincerity. She said nothing, but she raised her eyes, still filled with tears, to his face with a calm, answering look.

"It's a bad story, as bad as it could well be," he resumed. "I see it clearly enough now. I wanted uncle's money, wanted the easy time, and the good things, and all that. Then, when I did n't get it, I went in to make a big success and get the stuff anyhow. I saw a lot of men, no more able than I, who were making a lot of money, and nothing seemed to count so long as somehow you made good. I wanted to make good. It was a pretty cheap ambition!"

"Yes!" she exclaimed fervently, "cheap. Oh, so cheap!"

Yet, in these eight months that she had lived by herself she had come to see more justly the causes of things,- she had grown wiser. She held him now less rigidly, less remorselessly to her own ideal of life. For she had begun to understand that the poison which had eaten him was in the air he had breathed; it was the spirit of the city where he worked, of the country, of the day, the spirit of greed. It presented itself to men in the struggle for existence at every turn of the road, insidiously and honorably disguised as ambition and courage. She saw the man's temptation to strive with his competitors, as they strove, for the things which they held to be desirable. And she had come to know that to stand firmly against this

nature, a character, that the man she had married and worshiped had never possessed. He was of his time, neither better nor worse than his fellows, with their appetite for pleasure, their pride,—that ancient childish pride of man in the consideration and envy of his kind. . . .

"So you have it all, and it's bad enough, God knows! Nell, can you ever really forgive it, forget it, and love me again?"

For answer she kissed him understandingly. Now that her heart knew him utterly, with all his cowardice and common failings, she might still love him, even foreseeing the faltering and unideal way of his steps, giving him, like many women, her second love, the love that protects in place of the love that adores. And with that kiss there began a new marriage with the man she had seen large in her dreams the man who had been her hero. . . .

The elms swayed softly in the night wind, brushing across the window by their side. The old house was very still with the subdued calm of age, and man and wife sat there together, without words, looking far beyond them toward the future that was to be theirs.

XXVIII

The next day and the next went by in the peace of the old house. Now that the event which had so wholly occupied Hart's mind since the night when the Glenmore burned had come about; now that he was here in the old place, and had his wife and children once more, he began to consider the wreck of his affairs which had been left behind in Chicago. And he began to ask himself whether, after all, it was necessary for him to return to the city and make public his shame at the hearing before the coroner. He was not clear what service to justice or to the dead who had been sacrificed, as much through the corruption of civic government as by his own wrong-doing, his testimony

would accomplish. That it would surely ruin him professionally was beyond the shadow of a doubt. He could well picture to himself the ferocious glee with which the Thunderer would receive his evidence! Was it necessary to give his wife and his children into the Thunderer's merciless hands?

The evening mail of the second day brought a letter from Wheeler. The coroner's inquest, the lawyer wrote, was likely to drag on for a week or more. The coroner was a Republican, and "had it in for the city administration." He was trying to make all the personal and political capital that he could out of the affair. At present, as Jackson could see from the newspapers, they were engaged in examining minor witnesses, - the servants and employees of the Glenmore, the police and the firemen, trying to account for the origin of the fire. So the architect could be of no use now, at any rate, and had better stay quietly where he was until the matter took more definite shape. In the meantime it was understood that he was ill at his summer home. Graves, so Wheeler added, had been in to see him again. It was foolish to irritate the contractor, and make the matter worse than it was already, etc.

Then Hart opened the bundle of newspapers, and glanced through their padded pages. His eye was caught by an editorial caption:-

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GLENMORE TRAGEDY?

The article was a sarcastic summary of the results thus far of the inquest, done in the Thunderer's best manner. So far, the editorial writer pointed out, the inquiry had been confined to examining chamber-maids, bell-boys, and the police, and to quarreling about the exact location of the fire when it started. The Thunderer hoped that before closing the inquest the coroner would have the courage to go higher, and to probe the Building Department, and to ascertain what Mr. Bloom's connection with the matter

was, and whether his inspectors had ever made a report on the Glenmore. Further, the coroner might to advantage summon the officers of the hotel company, who had erected this fire-trap, and the architect whose plans for a fire-proof structure had been so lamentably inadequate. The Thunderer understood that the Glenmore Hotel Corporation was one of those paper corporations, officered by clerks, behind which unscrupulous capitalists shielded themselves. Of the officers whose names appeared in the papers of incorporation, three were clerks in the employ of a contractor named Graves, and a fourth was a prominent young architect who had prepared the plans for the building. The people of Chicago wanted to hear what these men had to say about the Glenmore hotel, especially Bloom, Graves, and Hart. "Look higher, Mr. Coroner!" the Thunderer concluded solemnly.

When Helen came into the room a little later, she found her husband plunged in thought, the sheets of the newspaper scattered about him.

"What is it?" she asked quickly.

He picked up the paper and handed it to her. She read the article in the Thunderer, her brow wrinkling in puzzle as she went on. When she had finished it, she let it fall from her hands, and looked at her husband inquiringly.

"They want you to go out there and tell about the building of the hotel?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered dully. "I knew it would come. You see Graves made me the treasurer of the corporation. I was only a dummy like the others," he explained. "The corporation was just Graves! But I told Everett that I should go back and tell what I knew. Only he does n't think it necessary, now!"

"What would happen? What does it all mean?"

He explained to her what the legal results might be in case the coroner's jury held him and others to the Grand Jury, as criminally liable for the disaster.

"Better even that than the disgrace between us," she whispered. "No, no! There is no other way."

At least there was no other way to her love, and that love he could not live without, cost him what it might.

"You are strong!" he confessed his admiration.

"And you, too!" she whispered back, her face illumined with the courage of her nature.

Little Powers, the younger boy, had not been well, and the next morning, when he was no better, Jackson urged that it would be unwise to take him, that he had best go back alone. But Helen would not consent, knowing that he made the most of the child's illness to spare her the trial which was to come.

"It is nothing," she said. "Mother thinks it will do no harm to take him. And if he is going to be sick, it would be better for us to be there in the city than here."

So they drove over to Verulam and took the train. After the boys had been put to bed for the night, Helen came back to the section where the architect was sitting, looking dully into the black fields.

"What do you think of this?" she exclaimed, putting a letter into his hands. "I got it just as we were leaving. It's from Venetia,—read it!"

He took the thick envelope from her hands, remembering suddenly the girl as he had last seen her, when she had summed him up in one bitter, opprobrious word. The sting of that word had gone, effaced by the experience which he had suffered since, and he opened the letter listlessly.

MY DEAR MOTHER SUPERIOR,- Do you recognize the Forest Park postmark? I am not going abroad after all. At least not just yet. Mother's gone, sails this week. Now listen, and I'll make your hair stand on end.

First mother! She's had a grievous

disappointment lately. Colonel Raymond,— you know him of course,— the little gray-whiskered railroad man, mother's pet indulgence for I can't say how long,—has at last been freed from the legal attachment of one wife and is about to take another at once. Whom do you think? The youngest Stewart girl! ! ! The wedding is for the 3d of June. We are not going, naturally. It was a crushing blow to poor mamma, she put her sailing forward a whole week to escape from her friends. She was positively getting old under it.

I know you don't like this, so I cut it very short. Now prepare! I am going to embrace the serious life, at last, - I mean matrimony. Really and truly, this time. You know the man, but you'd never think he's our doctor, Dr. Coburn. Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!

Mother threw a fit when I told her, and then, of course, I knew I was right. We are to be married any time, when he finishes up some work he has on hand, so that he can give me some attention. We might look in on you in your convent retirement, if sufficiently urged. Then I'll tell you all about it, and make him show you all the little tricks I have taught him. Mamma still calls him "that fellow," but he's by way of being a very distinguished man on account of some bug he's discovered. The medical journals are taking off their hats to him. I read the notices, don't you believe I am fast enough in love?

Well, I have had to send mamma abroad to recover her nerves, and I am out here fixing the place, which is to be rented to some awful people, whom you never heard of. By the way, the doctor is n't going to let me use my money,mother ought to thank him for that! and he won't promise to earn much money, either. He has no idea of keeping me in the state to which the Lord called me. He says if I want that, I can marry Stephen Lane or any other man. means to earn enough for a sensible woman to live on, and if I am not con

He

tent I can go out and learn how to earn some more for myself. Did you ever hear of a man who had the nerve to talk that way to the woman he wants to marry? . . .

We are going to have a laboratory on the West Side,-that gave Mrs. P. another fit,—and over it we'll have our rooms. Then when he's made enough rabbits dotty with his bug, and has written his papers, maybe we'll go abroad.... There are lots of other things, your things, I want to talk over, but my pen is too blunt for them. Only, I hope, oh, so much, dear, that you are to be happy again. Mr. Wheeler told me that Jack