CHAPTER XXIV

As the architect had said to his wife, nothing of a serious nature was to happen. In the end Everett Wheeler settled the matter. After the first gust of passion it was clear enough that the trustees could not have a scandal about the building. If the contractor were prosecuted, the architect, the donor's nephew, would be involved; and, besides, it was plain that Wheeler could not continue as trustee and assist in ruining his cousin. When it came to this point, Pemberton, not wishing to embarrass his associates, resigned.

Hart was to continue nominally as the architect for the school, but Trimble was to have actual charge of the building henceforth, with orders to complete the work as soon as possible according to the original specifications. At first Graves had blustered and threatened to sue if certain vouchers issued by Hart were not paid, but Wheeler "read the riot act" to him, and he emerged from the lawyer's office a subdued and fearful man. The calm lawyer had a long arm, which reached far into the city, and he frightened the contractor so thoroughly that he was content to be allowed to complete the contract. Whatever parts of his work had been done crookedly, he was to rectify as far as was possible, and Trimble was to see that the construction which remained to be done came up to specification. As for the irrevocable, the bad work already accepted and paid for, the lawyer said nothing.

Thus the man of the world, the perfectly cynical lawyer, had his way, which was, on the whole, the least troublesome way for all concerned, and avoided scandal. He was the calm one of the men involved: it was his business to make arrangements with human weakness and frailty and "to avoid scandal." That at all costs!

He made his cousin no long reproaches.

"We've nipped your claws, young man," he admonished him.

He was disappointed in Jackson. Privately he considered him a dunderheaded ass, who had weakly given himself as a tool to the contractor. In his dealings with men, he had known many rascals, more than the public was aware were rascals, and he respected some of them. But they were the men, who, once having committed themselves to devious ways, used other men as their tools. For little, foolish rascals, who got befogged and "lost their nerve," he had only contempt.

"How's your wife?" he asked bruskly. "That was a dirty blow she got here the other day—straight between the eyes. I never thought she'd come in here that afternoon."

"Helen has gone East with the boys and her mother,—to that place in Vermont. She hasn't been feeling well lately, and she needs the rest."

"Oh, um, I see," the lawyer commented, comprehending quite well what this journey meant. He was a little surprised that Helen should desert her husband at this crisis. In his philosophy it was the part of a woman who had character to "back her husband," no matter what he might do, so long as he was faithful to his marriage oath. Jackson had been a fool, like so many men; there was trouble in the air, and she had run away. He would not have thought it of her.

Hart swallowed his humiliation before his cousin. He was much relieved at the outcome of the affair; it released him from further responsibility for the school, which had become hateful to him. He was chiefly concerned, now, lest the difficulty with the trustees should become known and hurt his reputation, especially lest the men in his office, to whom he was an autocrat and a genius, should suspect something. He began at once to push the work on the last details for the hotel, with the hope of forcing Graves to deliver another block of the "stock," which he argued was due him for his commission.

Now that the matter had been quietly adjusted without scandal, he was inclined to feel more aggrieved than ever over his wife's departure. "She might have waited to see how it turned out," he repeated to himself, obstinately refusing her the right to judge himself except where his acts affected her publicly. For some time he kept up with acquaintances the fiction of Helen's "visit in the East"; he even took a room at the Shoreham Club for the hunting season. But he soon fancied that the people at the club were cool to him; fewer engagements came his way; no one referred to the great building, which had given him so much reputation; the men he had known best seemed embarrassed when he joined them,—men, too, who would not have winked an eye at a "big coup." The women soon ceased to ask about Helen; it was getting abroad that there was "something wrong with the Jackson Harts." For it had leaked, more or less, as such matters always will leak. One man drops a word to his neighbor, and the neighbor's wife pieces that to something she has heard or surmised.

So before the season was over Hart gave up his room at the club, where his raw self-consciousness was too often bruised. Then, finding his empty house in the city insupportable, he went to live with his mother in his uncle's old home. There was a lull in building at this time, due to the high prices of materials, but fortunately he could keep himself busy with the hotel and a large country house in the centre of the state, which often made an excuse for him to get away from the city.

Helen wrote to him from time to time, filling her letters with details about the boys. She suggested that they should return to the city to visit their grandmother during the Christmas holidays. She never referred to the situation between them, apparently considering that he had it in his power to end it when he would. He was minded often when he received these letters to write her sternly in reply, setting forth the wrong which in her obstinacy she was doing to herself and their children. He went over these imaginary letters in his idle moments, working out their phrases with great care; they had a fine, dignified ring to them, the tolerant and condoning note. But when he tried to write he did not get very far with them. Sometimes he thought of writing simply, "I love you very much, Nell; I want you back; can you not forgive me?" But he knew well that he could not merely say, "I have done wrong, forgive me," if he would affect that new will in his wife, so gently stern. Even if he could bring himself to confess his dishonesty, that would not suffice. There was another and deeper gulf between them, one that he could not clearly fathom. "From the very beginning we have lived wrongly," she had cried that last time. "We can never go on again in the same way." ... No, he was not ready to accept her judgment of him.

Thus the winter wore away, forlornly, and early in April the first hint of spring came into the dirty city. On a Sunday afternoon the architect went to call on his old friend, Mrs. Phillips, who was one of the few persons who gave him any comfort these days. He found her cutting the leaves of an art journal.

"There's an article here about that German—the one we are all trying to help, you know," she said, giving him a hand. "Yes, I have taken to patronizing the arts; it's pleasanter than charities. I have graduated from philanthropy. And you have to do something nowadays, if you want to keep up."

She spoke with her usual bluntness, and then added a little cant in a conventional tone:—

"And I think those of us who have the time and the position should do something to help these poor artists who are struggling here in this commercial city. People won't buy their pictures.... But what is the matter with you? You look as if you had come to the end of everything. I suppose it's the old story. That cold Puritan wife of yours has gone for good. It's no use pretending to me; I knew from the start how it would be."

"But I don't know whether she has gone for good," he muttered.

"You might as well make up your mind to it. Two people like you two can't get along together."

"It isn't that," he protested. "We have been very happy until lately."

"Well, don't mope, whatever you do. Either go and eat your humble pie, or arrange for a divorce. You can't go on this way much longer. Oh, I know all your troubles, of course. Hasn't that pleasant brother-in-law of mine been in here rehearsing that story about the school,—well, what do you call it? And he seems to hold me responsible for the mess, because I liked you, and gave you your first chance. I didn't corrupt you, did I?"

The architect moved uneasily. The widow's levity displeased him, and roused his anger afresh against the trustees.

"I don't know what rot Judge Phillips has been telling you, but—"

"Come," she interrupted him in his defence, "sit down here by me and let me talk to you. You know me well enough to see that I don't care what the judge says. But I have something to say to you."

She made a place for him on the lounge, and tossed him a pillow to make him comfortable. Then, dropping her review on the floor, she locked her fingers behind her head and looked searchingly at the man.

"I don't know what you have been up to, and I don't care. Harrison always said I hadn't any moral sense, and I suppose I haven't of his sort. You should have had your uncle's money, or a good part at any rate, and it's natural that you should try to get all you can of it now, I say. But you must have been stupid to let that old square-toes Pemberton get in your way."

This cynical analysis of the situation was not precisely salve to the architect's wound. He was not ready to go as far as the woman lightly sketched. But he listened, for the sake of her sympathy, if for no other reason.

"Now, as I said, there's no use moping around here. Pick right up and get out for a few months. When you come back, people won't remember what was the matter. Or, if you still find it chilly, you can go to New York and start there. It's no use fighting things out and all that. Bury them."

She paused to give emphasis to her suggestion,

"Let your wife play by herself for a while; it will do her good. When she hears that you are in Europe, having a good time, she'll begin to see she's been silly.... I am going over, too. I've got to rent Forest Manor this summer. That Harris man went wrong the last time he advised me, and got me into all sorts of trouble,—industrials. Venetia pensions me! She won't go abroad, but she kindly gives me what she thinks I ought to spend for the summer and advises me to go over. I sail on the Kronprinz, the 20th."

The invitation to him was implied in the pause that followed. The gleam in the man's eyes showed his interest in her suggestion, but he made no reply.

"There's nothing to do in your business just now, as you said, and you should give these talky people a chance to forget. We could have a good time over there. You might buy some things and sell them here, and make your expenses that way easily. You know all the nice little places, and if Maida and her husband come over, we could take an auto and do them. Think of Italy in May!"

She unclasped her hands and leaned forward, resting one arm on the cushioned back of the lounge, and thus revealing a very pretty forearm and wrist. Two little red spots of enthusiasm glowed in her cheeks. What life and vitality at forty-three! the man thought, smiling appreciatively into her face. For the first time she moved him emotionally. He was lonely, miserable, and thoroughly susceptible to such charm as she had.

"It would be awfully pleasant," he said at last, leaning toward her, "to get away from this place, with you!" ...

His hand slipped to her beautiful arm. At that moment Venetia came into the room, unnoticed by the two on the lounge. She stood for a little while watching them, and then, with a smile on her expressive lips, noiselessly withdrew.

"Well, wire for a passage to-morrow," Mrs. Phillips murmured....

There was nothing more, nothing that would have offended the most scrupulous; for the architect, at least, was essentially healthy-minded. In a lonely moment he might satisfy the male need for sympathy by philandering with a pretty woman, who soothed his bruised egotism. But he did not have that kind of weakness—the woman weakness. A few minutes later he was leaving the room, saying as he looked into Louise Phillips's brown eyes:—

"Yes, I think you are right. I need to get away from this town for a while and rest my nerves."

"When you come back people will be only too glad to see you. They don't remember their scruples long."

"There isn't anything for them to worry over."

"The Kronprinz, then."

In the hall he met Venetia, who was slowly coming down the stairs, wrapped in a long cloak. She hesitated a moment, then continued to descend.

"Hello, Venetia!" Hart called out.

She swept down the remaining steps without replying, her eyes shining hotly. As she passed him, she turned and shot one word full in his face,—"Cad!"

CHAPTER XXV

The girl's word was like a blow in the face. It toppled over any self-complacency that had survived these last disintegrating months. Was he as mean a thing as that? So little that a girl whom he had always treated with jovial condescension might insult him, unprovoked? Probably others, all those people whose acquaintance he valued, had a like contempt for him, which they refrained, conventionally, from expressing. At first he did not resent their judgment; he was too much dazed.

In this plight he walked south on the avenue, without minding where he was going, and then turned west, automatically, at Twenty-second Street, walking until he came to the region of dance halls and flashy saloons. In this unfamiliar neighborhood there was a glare of light from the great electric signs which decorated the various places of resort, and the street was crowded with men and women, who loitered about the saloons and dance halls, enjoying the fitful mildness of the April evening. At this early hour there were more women than men on the street, and their dresses of garish spring colors, their loud, careless voices, and air of reckless ease, reminded the architect faintly, very faintly, of the boulevards he had loved in his happy student years. In this spot of the broad American city coarse license flourished, and the one necessity for him who sought forgetfulness was the price of pleasure. The scene distracted his mind for the moment from the sting of the girl's contempt.

He entered one of the larger saloons on the corner of an avenue, and sat down at a small table. When the waiter darted to him, and, impudently leering across the table into his face, asked, "What's yours, gent?" he answered quickly: "Champagne! Bring me a bottle and ice." His heavy spirit craved the amber wine, which, in association at least, heartens man. At the tables all about him sat the women of the neighborhood, large-boned and heavy creatures, drinking beer by themselves, or taking champagne with stupid-looking rough men, probably buyers and sellers of stock at the Yards, which were not far away. The women had the blanched faces of country girls over whom the city has passed like the plates of a mighty roller. The men had the tan of the distant prairies, from which they had come with their stock. Their business over, the season's profit obtained, they had set themselves to deliberate debauch that should last for days,—as long as the "wad" held out and the brute lust in their bodies remained unquenched.

Presently the waiter returned with the heavy bottle and slopped some of the wine into a glass. The architect raised it and drank. It was execrable, sweetened stuff, but he drank the glass at a draught, and poured another and drank it. The girl's inexplicable insult swept over him afresh in a wave of anger. He should find a way somehow to call her to account....

"Say, mister, you don't want to drink all that wine by yourself, do you?"

A woman at the next table, who was sitting alone before an empty beer glass and smoking a cigarette, had spoken to him in a furtive voice.

"Come over, then," he answered, roughly pushing a chair to the table. "Here, waiter, bring another glass."

The woman slid, rather than walked, to the chair by his side, and drank the champagne like a parched animal. He ordered another bottle.

"Enjoying yourself?" she inquired politely, having satisfied her first thirst. "Been in the city long? I ain't seen you here at Dove's before."

He looked at her with languid curiosity. She recalled to him the memory of her Paris sisters, with whom he had shared many a consommation in those blessed days that he had almost forgotten. But she had none of the sparkle, the human charm, of her Latin sisters. She was a coarse vessel, and he wondered at the men who sought joy in her.

"Where do you come from?" he demanded.

"Out on the coast. San Diego's my home. But I was in Philadelphia last winter. I guess I shall go back to the East pretty soon. I don't like Chicago much—it's too rough out here to suit me."

She found Chicago inferior! He laughed with the humor of the idea. It was a joke he should like to share with his respectable friends. They drank and talked while the evening sped, and he plied her with many questions in idle curiosity, touched with that interest in women of her class which most men have somewhere in the dregs of their natures. She chatted volubly, willing enough to pay for her entertainment.

As he listened to her, this creature of the swift instants, whose only perception was the moment's sensation, he grew philosophical. The other world, his proper world of care and painful forethought, faded from his vision. Here in Dove's place he was a thousand miles from the respectabilities in which he had his being. Here alone in the city one might forget them, and nothing mattered,—his troubles, his wife's judgment of him, the girl's contempt.

At last he had loosened that troublesome coil of things, which lately had weighed him down, and it seemed easy enough to cut himself free from it for good and walk the earth once more unhampered, like these, the flotsam of the city.

"Come! Let's go over to Grinsky's hall," the woman suggested, noticing the architect's silence, and seeing no immediate prospect of another bottle of wine. "We'll find something doing over there, sure."

But he was already tired of the woman; she offended his cultivated sensibilities. So he shook his head, paid for the wine, said good evening to her, and started to leave the place. She followed him, talking volubly, and when they reached the street she took his arm, clinging to him with all the weight of her dragging will.

"You don't want to go home yet," she coaxed. "You're a nice gentleman. Come in here to Grinsky's and give me a dance."

Her entreaties disgusted him. People on the street looked and smiled. At the bottom he was a thoroughly clean-minded American; he could not even coquette with debauch without shame and timidity. She and her class were nauseating to him, like evil-smelling rooms and foul sights. That was not his vice.

He paid for her admission to the dance-hall, dropped a dollar in her hand, and left her. Then where to go? How to pass the hours? He was at an utter loss what to do with himself, like all properly married, respectable men, when the domestic pattern of their lives is disturbed for any reason. So, vaguely, without purpose, he began to stroll east in the direction of the lake, taking off his hat to let the night wind cool his head. He found walking pleasant in the mild spring air, and when he came to the end of the street he turned south into a deserted avenue that was starred in the dark night by a line of arc lamps. It was a dull, respectable, middle-class district, quite unfamiliar to him, and he stared inquiringly at the monotonous blocks of brick houses and cheap apartment buildings. Here was the ugly, comfortable housing of the modern city, where lived a mass of good citizens,—clerks and small business men with their wives and children. He wondered vaguely if this was what his wife would have him come to, this dreary monotony of small homes, each one like its neighbor, where the two main facts of existence were shelter and food.

A wave of self-pity swept over him, and his thoughts returned to his old grievance: if Helen had stayed by him all would have been well. He wanted his children; he wanted his home, his wife, his neighbors, his little accustomed world of human relationships,—all as it had been before. And he blamed her for destroying his happiness, shutting his mind obstinately to any other consideration, unwilling to admit even to his secret self that his greed, his thirst for luxury, had aught to do with the case. He had striven with all his might, even as the bread winners in these houses strove daily, to get a point of vantage in the universal struggle. Doubtless these humble citizens had their modicum of content. But why should he, with his larger appetite, be condemned to their level? The idea was utterly repugnant to him, and gradually that heavy weight of depression, which the wine had temporarily lifted, pressed on his spirits.

He must have walked many blocks on this avenue between the monotonous small houses. In the distance beyond him, to the south, he saw a fiery glow on the soft heavens, which he took to be the nightly reflection from the great blast furnaces of the steel works in South Chicago. Presently as he emerged upon a populous cross street, the light seemed suddenly much nearer, and, unlike the soft effulgence from the blast furnaces, the red sky was streaked with black. On the corners of the street there was an unwonted excitement,—men gaping upward at the fiery cloud, then running eastward, in the direction of the lake. From the west there sounded the harsh gong of a fire-engine, which was pounding rapidly down the car tracks. It came, rocking in a whirlwind of galloping horses and swaying men. The crowd on the street broke into a run, streaming along the sidewalks in the wake of the engine.

The architect woke from his dead thoughts and ran with the crowd. Two, three, four blocks, they sped toward the lake, which curves eastward at this point, and as he ran the street became strangely familiar to him. The crowd turned south along a broad avenue that led to the park. Some one cried: "There it is! It's the hotel!" A moment more, and the architect found himself at the corner of the park opposite the lofty building, out of whose upper stories broad billows of smoke, broken by tongues of flame, were pouring.

There, in the corner made by the boulevard and the park, where formerly was the weedy ruin, rose the great building, which Graves had finished late in the winter, and had turned over to the hotel company. Its eight stories towered loftily above the other houses and apartment buildings in the neighborhood. The countless windows along the broad front gleamed portentously with the reflection from the flames above. At the west corner, overlooking the park, above a steep ascent of jutting bay windows, there floated a light blue pennon, bearing a name in black letters,—THE GLENMORE.

At first the architect scarcely realized that this building which was burning was Graves's hotel, his hotel. The excitement of the scene stupefied him. Already the police had roped off the streets beneath the fire, in which the crowd was thickening rapidly. From many points in the adjoining blocks came the shrill whistles of the throbbing engines, answering one another. The fire burned quietly aloft in the sky, while below there rose the clamor of excited men and screeching engines. The crowd grew denser every moment, and surged again and again nearer the building, packing solidly about the fire lines. Hart was borne along in the current.

"They've pulled the third alarm," one man said in his ear, chewing excitedly on a piece of gum. "There's more'n fifty in there yet!"

"They say the elevators are going still!" another one exclaimed.

"Where's the fire-escapes?"

"Must be on the rear or over by the alley. There ain't none this side, sure enough."

"Yes, they're in back," the architect said authoritatively.

He tried to think just where they were and where they opened in the building, but could not remember. A voice wailed dismally through a megaphone:—

"Look out, boys! Back!"

On the edge of the cornice appeared three little figures with a line of hose. At that height they looked like willing gnomes on the crust of a flaming world.

"Gee! Look at that roof! Look at it!"

The cry from the megaphone had come too late. Suddenly, without warning, the top of the hotel rose straight into the air, and from the sky above there sounded a great report, like the detonation of a cannon at close range. The roof had blown up. For an instant darkness followed, as if the flame had been smothered, snuffed out. Then with a mighty roar the pent-up gases that had caused the explosion ignited and burst forth in a broad sheet of beautiful blue flame, covering the doomed building with a crown of fire.

Hart looked for the men with the hose. One had caught on the sloping roof of a line of bay windows, and clung there desperately seven stories above the ground.

"He's a goner!" some one near him groaned.

Large strips of burning tar paper began to float above the heads of the crowd, causing a stampede. In the rush, Hart got nearer the fire lines, more immediately in front of the hotel, which irresistibly drew him closer. Now he could hear the roar of the flame as it swept through the upper stories and streamed out into the dark night. The fierce light illumined the silk streamer, which still waved from the pole at the corner of the building, untouched by the explosion. Across the east wall, under the cornice, was painted the sign: THE GLENMORE FAMILY HOTEL; and beneath, in letters of boastful size, FIREPROOF BUILDING. Tongues of flame danced over the words.

The policeman at the line pointed derisively to the legend with his billy.

"Now ain't that fireproof!"

"Burns like rotten timber!" a man answered.

It was going frightfully fast! The flames were now galloping through the upper stories, sweeping the lofty structure from end to end, and smoke had begun to pour from many points in the lower stories, showing that the fount of flame had its roots far down in the heart of the building. Vague reports circulated through the crowd: A hundred people or more were still in the hotel. All were out. Thirty were penned in the rear rooms of the sixth floor. One elevator was still running. It had been caught at the time of the explosion, etc.... For the moment the firemen were making their fight in the rear, and the north front was left in a splendid peace of silent flame and smoke—a spectacle for the crowd in the street.

Within the lofty structure, the architect realized vaguely, there was being enacted one of those modern tragedies which mock the pride and vanity of man. In that furnace human beings were fighting for their lives, or, penned in, cut off by the swift flames, were waiting in delirious fear for aid that was beyond the power of men to give them. A terrible horror clutched him. It was his building which was being eaten up like grass before the flame. He dodged beneath the fire line and began to run toward the east end, driven by a wild impulse that he could not control. He must do something,—must help! It was his building; he knew it from cornice to foundation; he might know how to get at those within! A policeman seized him roughly and thrust him back behind the line. He fought his way to the front again, while the dense crowd elbowed and cursed him. He lost his hat; his coat was half torn from his shoulders. But he struggled frantically forward.

"You here, Hart! What are you after?"

Some one stretched out a detaining hand and drew him out of the press. It was Cook, his draughtsman. Cook was chewing gum, his jaws working nervously, grinding and biting viciously in his excitement. The fierce glare revealed the deep lines of the man's face.

"You can't get out that way. The street's packed solid!" Cook bellowed into his ear. "God alive, how fast it's going! That's your steel frame, tile partition, fireproof construction, is it? To hell with it!"

Suddenly he clutched the architect's arm again and shouted:—

"Where are the east-side fire-escapes? I can't see nothing up that wall, can you?"

The architect peered through the wreaths of smoke. There should have been an iron ladder between every two tiers of bay windows on this side of the building.

"They are all in back," he answered, remembering now that the contractor had cut out those on the east wall as a "disfigurement." "Let's get around to the rear," he shouted to the draughtsman, his anxiety whipping him once more.

After a time they managed to reach an alley at the southwest angle of the hotel, where two engines were pumping from a hydrant. Here they could see the reach of the south wall, up which stretched the spidery lines of a single fire-escape. Cook pointed to it in mute wonder and disgust.

"It's just a question if the beams will hold into the walls until they can get all the folks out," he shouted. "I heard that one elevator boy was still running his machine and taking 'em down. As long as the floors hold together, he can run his elevator. But don't talk to me about your fireproof hotels! Why, the bloody thing ain't been burning twenty minutes, and look at it!"

As he spoke there was a shrill whistle from the fire marshal, and then a wrenching, crashing, plunging noise, like the sound of an avalanche. The upper part of the east wall had gone, toppling outward into the alley like the side of a fragile box. In another moment followed a lesser crash. The upper floors had collapsed, slipping down into the inner gulf of the building. There was a time of silence and awful quiet; but almost immediately the blue flames, shot with orange, leaped upward once more. From the precipitous wall above, along the line of the fire-escape, came horrid human cries, and in the blinding smoke and flame appeared a dozen figures clinging here and there to the window frames like insects, as if the heat had driven them outward.

Cook swayed against the architect like a man with nausea.

"They're done for now, sure, all that ain't out. And I guess there ain't many out. It just slumped, just slumped," he repeated with a nervous quiver of the mouth. Suddenly he turned his pale face to the architect and glared into his eyes.

"Damn you, you son of a bitch! Damn you—you—" he stammered, shaking his fist at him. "There wasn't any steel in the bloody box! It was rotten cheese. That's you, you, you!" He turned and ran toward the burning mass, distracted, shouting as he ran: "Rotten cheese! Just rotten cheese!"

But the architect still stood there in the alley, rooted in horror, stupefied. High above him, in a window of the south wall, which was still untouched by the fire, he saw a woman crouching on the narrow ledge of the brick sill. She clung with one hand to an awning rope and put the other before her eyes. He shouted something to her, but he could not hear the sound of his own voice. She swayed back and forth, and then as a swirl of flame shot up in the room behind her, she fell forward into the abyss of the night.... A boy's face appeared at one of the lower windows. He was trying to break the pane of heavy glass. Finally he smashed a hole with his fist and stood there, dazed, staring down into the alley; then he dropped backward into the room, and a jet of smoke poured from the vent he had made.

In front of the hotel there were fresh shouts; they were using the nets, now. The architect covered his face with his hands, and moaning to himself began to run, to flee from the horrible spot. But a cry arrested him, a wail of multitudinous voices, which rose above the throb of the engines, the crackle of the fire, all the tumult of the catastrophe. He looked up once more to the fire-eaten ruin. The lofty south wall, hitherto intact, had begun to waver along the east edge. It tottered, hung, then slid backward, shaking off the figures on the fire-escape as if they had been frozen flies.... He put his hands to his eyes and ran. He could hear the crowd in the street groaning with rage and pity. As he ran he saw beside the park a line of ambulances and patrol wagons ready for their burdens.

How long he ran, or in what direction, he never knew. He had a dim memory of himself, sitting in some place with a bottle of whiskey before him. The liquor seemed to make no impression on his brain; his hand still shook with the paralysis of fear. He remembered his efforts to pour whiskey into the glass without spilling it. After a time a face, vaguely familiar, entered his nightmare, and the man, who carried a little black bag such as doctors use, sat down beside him and shouted at him:—

"What are you doing here? What do you want with that whiskey? Give it to me. You have had all the booze that's good for you, I guess."

And in his stupor he said to the man tearfully:—

"Don't take it away, doctor. For heaven's sake don't take the whiskey away! I tell you, I have killed people to-night. Eight, ten, forty—no, I killed eight people. Yes, eight men and women. I see 'em dying now. Give me the whiskey!"

"You're off your nut, man," the doctor replied impatiently. "You haven't killed any one. You have been boozing, and you'll kill yourself if you don't quit. Here, give me that!"

He remembered rising to his feet obediently and saying very solemnly:—

"Very well, my friend, I won't drink any more if you say so. But listen to me. I killed a lot of people, eight of 'em, and I don't know how many more besides—over there in a great fire. I saw 'em dying, like flies, like flies! Now give me one more drink."

"All right, you killed 'em, if you say so."

"Don't leave me, doctor! It's a terrible thing to kill so many people, all at once, like flies, like flies!"

And he burst into tears, sobbing and shaking with the awful visions of his brain, his head buried in his arms.

CHAPTER XXVI

The next morning Hart found himself on a sofa in a bare, dusky room that looked as if it was a doctor's office. He sat up and tried to think what had happened to him overnight. Suddenly the picture of the burning hotel swept across his memory, and he groaned with a fresh sense of sharp pain. Some one was whistling in the next room, and presently the door opened, and Dr. Coburn appeared in trousers and undershirt, mopping his face with a towel. The architect recognized him now, and knew that he was the one who had struggled with him in his dreams.

"Hello, Jack Hart!" the doctor called out boisterously. "How are you feeling? Kind of dopey? My, but you were full of booze last night! I had to jam a hypodermic into you to keep you quiet, when I got you over here. Do you get that way often?"

"Was I drunk?" the architect asked dully.

"Well, I rather think. Don't you feel it this morning?"

He grinned at the dishevelled figure on the sofa and continued to mop his face.

"You were talking dotty, too, about killing folks. I thought maybe you might have a gun on you. But I couldn't find anything. What have you been doing?"

"It was the fire," Hart answered slowly, "a terrible fire. People were killed—I saw them. My God! it was awful!"

He buried his face in his hands and shuddered.

"Shook you up considerable, did it? Your nerves are off. Here, wait a minute! I'll fix you something."

The doctor went back into the inner room and returned presently with a small glass.

"Drink this. It will give you some nerve."

The architect took the stimulant and then lay down once more with his face to the wall. Before long he pulled himself together and drank a cup of coffee, which the doctor had prepared. Then he took himself off, saying that he must get to his office at once. He went away in a daze, barely thanking the doctor for his kindness. When he had left, Coburn began to whistle again, thinking, "There's something more'n drink or that fire the matter with him!"

Hart bought a newspaper at the first stand. It was swelled with pages of coarse cuts and "stories" of the "Glenmore Hotel Tragedy." On the elevated train, which he took to reach the city, all the passengers were buried in the voluminous sheets of their newspapers, avidly sucking in the details of the disaster. For a time he stared at the great cut on the first page of his paper, which purported to represent the scene at the fire when the south wall fell. But in its place he saw the sheer stretch of pitiless wall, the miserable figures on the iron ladder being swept into the flames. Then he read the headlines of the account of the fire. Seventeen persons known to have been in the hotel were missing; the bodies of ten had been found. Had it not been for the heroism of a colored elevator boy, Morris by name, who ran his car up and down seven times through the burning shaft, the death list would have been far longer. On the second trip, so the account ran, the elevator had been caught by a broken gate on the third floor. Morris had coolly run his car back to the top, then opened the lever to full speed, and crashed his way triumphantly through the obstacle. It was one of those acts of unexpected intelligence, daring, and devotion to duty which bring tears to the eyes of thousands all over the land. The brave fellow had been caught in the collapse of the upper floors, and his body had not yet been found. It was buried under tons of brick and iron in the wrecked building.

The newspaper account wandered on, column after column, repeating itself again and again, confused, endlessly prolix, but in the waste of irrelevancy a few facts slowly emerged. The Glenmore, fortunately, had not been half full. It had been opened only six weeks before as a family hotel,—one of those shoddy places where flock young married people with the intention of avoiding the cares of children and the trials of housekeeping in modest homes; where there is music twice a week and dancing on Saturday evenings; where the lower windows are curtained by cheap lace bearing large monograms, and electric candles and carnations are provided for each table in the dining-room. Another year from this time there would have been three or four hundred people in the burning tinder box.

The fire had started somewhere in the rear of the second floor, from defective electric wiring, it was supposed, and had shot up the rear elevator shaft, which had no pretence of fireproof protection. The east wall had bulged almost at once, pulling out the supports for the upper three floors. It was to be doubted whether the beams, bearing-walls, and main partitions were of fireproof materials. The charred remains of Georgia pine and northern spruce seemed to indicate that they were not. At any rate, the incredible rapidity with which the fire had spread and the dense smoke showed that the "fireproofing" was of the flimsiest description. And, to cap all, there was but one small fire-escape on the rear wall, difficult of access! "The Glenmore," so the Chicago Thunderer pronounced, "was nothing but an ornamental coffin."

Editorially, the Thunderer had already begun its denunciation of the building department for permitting a contractor to erect such an obvious "fire-trap," and for granting the lessees a license to open it as a hotel. There had been too many similar horrors of late,—the lodging-house on West Polk Street, where five persons had lost their lives, the private hospital on the North Side, where fourteen men and women had been burned, etc. In all these cases it was known that the building ordinances had been most flagrantly violated. There was the usual clamor for "investigation," for "locating the blame," and "bringing the real culprits before the Grand Jury." It should be said that the Thunderer was opposed politically to the City Hall.

In the architect's office there was an air of subdued excitement. No work was in progress when Hart let himself into his private room from the hall. Instead, the men were poring over the broad sheets of the newspapers spread out on the tables. When he stepped into the draughting-room, they began awkwardly to fold up the papers and start their work. Cook, Hart noticed, was not there. The stenographer came in from the outer office and announced curtly:—

"The 'phone's been ringing every minute, Mr. Hart." She looked at the architect with mingled aloofness and curiosity. "They were mostly calls from the papers, and some of the reporters are in there now, waiting. What shall I say to 'em?"

"Say I am out of town," Hart ordered, giving the usual formula when reporters called at the office. Then he went back to his private room and shut the door. He dropped the bulky newspaper on the floor and tried to think what he should do. There were some memoranda on the desk of alterations which he was to make in a country house, and these he took up to examine. Soon his desk telephone rang, and when he put the receiver to his ear, Graves's familiar tones came whispering over the line. The contractor talked through the telephone in a subdued voice, as if he thought to escape eavesdropping at the central office by whispering.

"Is that you, Hart? Where have you been? I've been trying to get you all the morning. Say, can't you come over here quick?"

"What do you want?" the architect demanded sharply. The sound of the man's voice irritated him.

"Well, I want a good many things," Graves replied coldly. "I guess we had better get together on this business pretty soon."

"You can find me over here the rest of the morning," Hart answered curtly.

There was a pause of several seconds, and then the contractor telephoned cautiously:—

"Say, I can't leave just now. That Dutchman's in here pretty drunk, and I don't want him to get loose. Come over, quick!"

"All right," the architect muttered dully, hanging up his telephone. He was minded to refuse, but he realized that it would be best to see what was the matter. Some plan of action must be decided upon. Meyer was one of the officers and directors of the Glenmore Hotel Corporation. The architect and a couple of clerks in the contractor's office were the other dummies in this corporation, which had been organized solely to create bonds and stock and to escape personal liability.

Hart gathered up the memoranda on his desk, and telling the stenographer that he was going out to Eversley to see the Dixon house, he left the office. As he stepped into the hall, he met Cook, who had just come from the elevator. He nodded to the draughtsman and hailed a descending car.

"Say, Hart," Cook said in a quiet voice, "can I have a word with you?"

Hart stepped back into the hall and waited to hear what the draughtsman had to say.

"I must have been pretty near crazed last night, I guess," Cook began, turning his face away from the architect, "and I said things I had no call to say."

"Come in," Hart murmured, unlocking the door to his private office.

"Of course, it wasn't my business, anyway," Cook continued, "to accuse you, no matter what happened. But I saw a friend of mine this morning, a man on the Thunderer, and he had just come from the city hall, where he'd been to examine the Glenmore plans. He says they're all right. Same as ours in the office. I can't understand what happened to the old thing unless Graves— Well, that's not our business."

There was a pause, while the two men stood and looked at each other. Finally Cook added:—

"So I wanted to tell you I was wrong,—I had no call to talk that way."

"That's all right, Cook," the architect replied slowly. Somehow the man's apology hurt him more than his curses. They still stood waiting. Suddenly Hart exclaimed:—

"You needn't apologize, man! The plans are all right. But that doesn't let me out. I knew what Graves was going to do with 'em. I knew it from the start."

"What do you say?" the draughtsman demanded, bewildered.

"The hotel was a job from the start," Hart repeated.

There was another pause, which was broken by Cook.

"Well, I suppose after this you won't want me any more?"

"I suppose not," the architect answered in a colorless tone.

"All right; I'll go to-day if you say so."

"As you please."

And they parted. Cook was an honest, whole-souled man. It was best that he should leave the office, Hart reflected, as he went down in the elevator—best for Cook and for him too. The draughtsman's admiration for him had been his daily incense, and it would be intolerable to see him daily with this matter between them, even if Cook would stay.

Hart found Graves in his inner office, while a clerk held at bay a roomful of men who wanted to get at the contractor. Graves looked serious, but undisturbed, manifesting no more outward emotion than if he had come from the funeral of a distant relative.

"It's a pretty bad mess, ain't it?" he said to the architect, offering him a cigar. "I guess you were right. Those first story walls weren't solid. They must have bulged and pulled the whole business down.... Of course the papers are hot. They always yap considerable when anything happens. They'll spit fire a week or so, and then forget all about it. Everything is straight over at the city hall so far. There'll be the coroner's inquest, of course. But he won't find much. The only danger is this cuss Meyer. He's been on a spree and is pretty well shook up. If they get hold of him, and ask him questions at the inquest, he's liable to tell all he knows, and more too. What I want you to do is to take care of the Dutchman."

"What do you mean to do about the inquest?" Hart asked abruptly.

"Do? Well, the best thing for all of us who have been concerned with the Glenmore is to be called out of the city for two or three weeks or so. I have got to go to Philadelphia to-night or to-morrow, if I can get away. Gotz will be here to go on the stand if they want to get after the hotel corporation. They won't make much out of him. Now, if you can take care of the Dutchman—"

"What do you mean?"

Graves looked at the architect critically before answering.

"Don't lose your nerve, Hart. It'll come out all right. I've seen my lawyer this morning, and I know just what they can do with us, and it ain't much. They can get after the building department, but they're used to that. And they can bring a civil suit against the corporation, which will do no harm. You keep out of the way for a while, and you won't get hurt a particle. Take the Dutchman up to Milwaukee and drown him. Keep him drunk—he's two-thirds full now. Lucky he came here instead of blabbing to one of those newspaper fellers! Keep him drunk, and ship him up north on the lakes. By the time he finds his way back, his story won't be worth telling."

Hart looked at the big mass of a man before him, and loathed him with all his being. He wanted to take him by one of his furry ears and shake the flesh from his bones. The same impulse that had prompted him to admit his guilt to Cook, the impulse to free his mind from the intolerable coil of fraud, cost what it might, was stirring again within him.

"Well?" Graves inquired.

"I am going to quit," the architect said, almost involuntarily. "I'm sick of the business, and I shan't run away. You can look after Meyer yourself—"

"Perhaps you're looking for some money, too?" the contractor sneered.

"No more of yours, I know that!" Hart answered, rising from his chair and taking his hat. "I'm sick of the whole dirty job, and if they want me to, I'll talk, too, I suppose."

"You damned, white-livered sneak! Ain't you got enough gut in you to sit tight? You—"

But the contractor was swearing at the blank wall of his office.

When the architect reached the street he hesitated. Instead of taking the train for Eversley, as he had intended to do, he got on an electric car that ran far out into the northern suburbs. He kept saying to himself that he wanted time to think, that he must think it all out before he returned to his office. For he was not yet sure that it would be best to stay and bear the brunt of the coming investigation, as he had said to the contractor. He was not clear whether that would do any good.

But he did not think. Instead, he brooded over the visions of the past night, which beset him. When the car stopped he got out and walked north along the lake shore, vaguely intending to reach Eversley in that way. He was still trying to think, but he saw nothing clearly—nothing but that terrible picture of the burning hotel, the dying men and women. Thus he walked on and on, still trying to think, to find himself....

CHAPTER XXVII

... He had been lying there long hours close to the warm earth that was preparing for a new life. The thin branches of the trees rose bare and severe between him and the blue sky, mementos of the silent winter. The ground about their trunks was matted with dead leaves, through which nothing green had yet pushed its way. Nevertheless, the earth seemed yeasty with promise. The intense, unwonted heat of the April days had broken the crust of soil and set the sap of life in motion once more. The air was heavy with earthy odors,—a fragrant forecast of Nature's regeneration. Deep down in the little ravines, and among the pools of the meadowland beyond, frogs were croaking harshly, filling the solitude of the still slumbering woods with the clamor of awakening life. And through the brown tree trunks, above the tracery of the topmost branches, over the flat fields, there swam the haze of earliest spring—a vague atmosphere of renascence, the warm breath of mother earth.

The man lay there, empty of thought, feeling remotely the mighty movement of things around him—an inert mass in a vital world. The odors of the earth stirred in him faintly old sensations of vivid springtimes in his youth, when the ecstasy of the great world of sun and sky and cloud, of distant fields and mounting uplands, had thrilled his heart. He saw again the morning mist swimming above the little Wisconsin lakes where he used to hunt, and felt the throb of joy for the on-coming spring. And he remembered how this outer world had spoken to him one day while he was sitting at his work in Paris. Something imperceptible had crept into the room over the endless roofs, and called to him in a low, persistent voice. Then he had listened, joyously putting aside his task, and obeyed the invitation, wandering idly forth into the germinating fields, which in some mysterious way had purified his soul of all petty things. In his youth that experience had come to him again and again, an impulse from beyond his world, which had led him forth from himself, from the soil of living, to fresh vigor and purity. Latterly there had come to him no call like this; he had known no abandonment of self in the enveloping force of Nature, no purification of spirit. The trees and the grass, the earth and the sky, all the multitudinous voices of unconscious life, had not spoken to him. Shut within himself, driven by the bitter furies of his own little being, he had worked from season to season, forgetting the face of Nature. True, he had lived the outdoor life of the world, passed through the beautiful fields each season, just as he had gone to the theatre or the opera. But the earth had not spoken to him, alone, personally, out of her abundant wisdom, garnered through the limitless years. For all the period of his maturity he had forgotten the great mother of life.

Now, wrecked and bruised, he lay there on her breast, as a sick man might lie in the silent room of a hospital and listen to the large commotion of life without. He was content to rest there on the warm earth, waiting and listening for the voice which should come from beyond, content to forget himself,—a creature that had been industriously shaped for eight busy years, a creature of the city and of men, with a self that was his in part only, and was mixed with all those others whom he had touched. That figure of deformity, made in the strife of the city, he no longer recognized to be his. The richer heart of youth, with its pictured hopes, the beauty of early days, came back to him and blessed him.... The sun sank into the deepening blue haze of the heavens; the thin shadows of the trees faded from the brown earth; the south wind from the prairies began to rise, blowing strongly, scented by the breeding land over which it had come. And as the day drew to its close, the murmuring voices of re-created life ascended from all parts of the earth with a strengthened note. The tree-toads were chorusing in the damp hollows, and the spice of roots and mould sucked out by the hot sun was descending once more in damp fragrance to the earth. The moist, crumbling soil beneath the man's body was opening itself—stirring, awakening, preparing, for the gigantic tasks of renewal, of re-creation, of conception and birth. An immense, powerful, impersonal life, the greatest Life of all, was going forward all about him. In the midst of this large mystery he felt that he was but an atom—an accident which counted for nothing.

That terrible vision of dying men and women no longer haunted the man's mind. The catastrophe which had shaken him to the roots of his being sank into its place behind the long procession of those acts, which had made him what he was. Now, at last, he began to think coherently, to see himself in the whole of his being, step by step, as he had come to be. The old man's death and funeral rose before him, and he remembered his restless preoccupation with the money so soon to be his, while others sorrowed and prayed. Then came the will, which he had resented, and the growing lust for the money that had slipped from his grasp. Born of that lust, bred in envy and hot desire, was the will to succeed. From the first day of his struggle for success there came before his eyes the man Graves. The contractor's fat, bearded face was the sordid image of his sin, familiar in its cupidinous look. It was the image of that greed to which he had submitted himself, with which he had consented to do evil. From the very hour when he had caught the contractor's eye in the Canostota, and the two had committed fraud over the weight of steel in an I-beam, there had set forth a long, long train of petty dishonesties, which had created in him the vitiating habit of insincerity. One by one he recalled the fraudulent works in which he had had a part,—the school from which he had tried to steal some of the money his uncle had denied him, and finally this hotel, which had crumbled at the touch of fire. That was the strange, dramatic climax of the story, fated so to be from the first petty lust for money, from the first fraud.

Greed, greed! The spirit of greed had eaten him through and through, the lust for money, the desire for the fat things of the world, the ambition to ride high among his fellows. In the world where he had lived this passion had a dignified name; it was called enterprise and ambition. But now he saw it for what it was,—greed and lust, nothing more. It was in the air of the city which he had breathed for eight years.... In his pride he had justified knavery by Success. He had judged himself mean and small merely because he had failed to cheat and steal and trick "in a large way." Only the little and the weak need be honest; to the strong all things were right—he had said glibly. Now, for the first day since the strength of his manhood, he saw acts, not blurred by his own passions, not shifting with the opinions of the day; but he saw them fixed and hard,—living, human acts, each one in its own integrity, with its own irrevocable fate; acts expressed in lowered eyelids of consent, in shrugs, in meaningful broken phrases; acts unprofessional, sharp, dishonest, criminal.

He lay in the gathering twilight, listened, and saw. And at last the soul of the man, which had been long in hiding, came back, and flowed into him once more. A deep, new longing filled his heart, a desire to be once again as he had been before, to rise from his debasement and become clean, to slough off this parasitic self into which he had grown all these years of his strife in the city, to be born anew like the springtime earth—such longings as come to men when they are sickened with the surfeit of their passions.

... He knew now why his wife had left him. She had felt the leper taint, which had been eating at his heart all the years of their marriage, and had repudiated it. She had cried out against the mere getting and spending of money, to which low ebb those lofty ambitions of his youth had descended before her eyes. She had loved him as the creator, the builder; and he had given her no visions, but only the sensualities of modern wealth. "Let us begin again and live the common life," she had cried out to him. "Let us live for work and not for money." He had put her aside with contempt, and refused to open the dark places of his life to her. Now he knew that she had done well to leave him to his own day of judgment. And the first impulse in the man's new soul was to go to her, humbly, and say to her: "You were right. I have sinned against myself, against you, against life, all along the way. Will you accept my repentance, and love me again from the beginning, knowing now the truth?" Ardently he desired to hear her answer; but his heart left him in doubt as to what that answer might be. For he understood at last that he had never known this woman, who had been his wife for eight years.

Nevertheless, despite this hunger of his heart for the woman he loved, there rose in him slowly a purging sense of relief from crime and sin committed. It had passed away, was put off from himself. Surely he was to come once more into peace! The upspringing life of the reincarnated earth chanted all about him but one song: "Here I leave my uncleanness. Life is strong and good. There is, for all, forgiveness and peace. Here I bury the filth of my deeds, and renew my hope." Thus man rises again and again from the depths of his abasement; thus springs in him a new hope, a vital, imperishable element, the soul of his being; and he is prepared afresh for the struggle. Deep within him there lies forever the unconquerable conviction of his power to rise, to renew himself.

So, after the tempest of debauch, little men wake from their carnal desires, and, leaving behind them the uncleanness of their flesh, go forth into the pure morning, subdued and ashamed, yet irresistibly sure that life is good and holds forgiveness and hope for them. With the new day they will become like their dreams, clean and pure. Thus, also, those larger men, not eaten by bodily lusts, those greater sinners who are caught on the whirling spikes of bolder passions, who are torn and twisted—these, also, return at certain hours to the soul within them, and renew there the pure fire of their natures, so that they may enter again the endless contest having hope and health. Thus, above all, the great heart of things, the abundant mother of life, the earth, renews herself eternally according to the laws of her being, and comes forth afresh and undiminished for the business of living.

The mere lump of man lying there inert upon the ground felt this great process of renewal all about him, and sucked in fresh life and health. In like manner, years before, in his youth, he had gone down to the sea, and there had known something of this mysterious sensation of renewal. His body plunged in cool, black sea-water, he had drawn through the pores of his flesh the elemental currents of life. He longed now to escape again from men, to go down to the sea and touch those waters washing in from their remote tidal courses up and down the earth. By such means Nature cleanses and teaches man. Heedless of man, unconcerned with his follies and vices, impersonal, irresistible, majestic, she receives his head upon her breast, and renews within him his spirit,—the power to battle, the power to live.

The fruitful earth holds in her bosom death and life, both together, and out of her comes health. In like manner there lie in the heart of man diverse instincts,—seeds of good and evil, ready to germinate. For long seasons seeds of one kind burst forth in the soil of a man's nature and thrive. Accident, the intricate web of fate, gives them their fit soil, their heat, their germinating impulse. And the world about them, seeing the fruit of these seeds alone, calls the man good or bad, and thus makes its rude analysis of character, as something set and fixed, stamped upon the soul forever. But in their own time other seeds, perchance ripening late and slowly, come to their day of germination, seeds of unlike nature, with diverse fruit. Such sprout and send their life forth into the man, creating a new nature which the world will not recognize as his. Thus it was happening with this man: commingled in his heart and brain there had lain diverse seeds of many kinds,—seeds of decay and seeds of life. Impulses of creative purpose, of unselfish work—these had been long dormant; impulses of lust and greed and deceit—these had grown rankly in the feverish life of the city until they had flowered in crime. Now had come to him the time of fate; the first harvest of his acts was garnered; and the new seeds of his life were ready to wake from their sleep in the depths of his being, to put forth their energies, their demands. Some great shock—the agony of dying men and women—had quickened this new growth. So happened the miracle of rebirth, hidden far away from all human observation, first revealing itself in the consciousness of purification and renewed health.

The song of the springtime earth rose ever upward, calming and healing the man, who at last had caught its message. It said to him: "Another sun, a new day, an earth ever fresh from the hand of God! Eternal hope—the burial of the corrupt body with its misdeeds; health, and not decay; life, and not death. For life is good. There is forgiveness and renewal for all those who heed." ... Through the misty heavens above the trees the stars glimmered faintly. Over the prairie, fields, and woodland the night wind passed, soft, odorous, charged with the breath of the earth in the conceiving time of life....

Under the starlight of the spring night there might be seen the figure of a man walking southward toward the black horizon of the great city. He walked neither fast nor slow, but steadily, evenly, as if urged by one powerful purpose,—some magnetic end that set his nerves and his muscles to the rhythm of action.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The architect had a long time to wait in Wheeler's office that morning. The lawyer rarely came in before ten, so the stenographer said, looking suspiciously into the man's white, unshaven face. She knew Hart quite well, and she was wondering what was the matter with him—whether he was in trouble or had been on a spree overnight. He sat in one of the armchairs of the outer office provided for waiting clients, and, absorbed in his own thoughts, stared at the square of green carpet beneath his feet. When Wheeler finally entered, he threw a careless glance at the seated figure and said blankly:—

"Come in here!"

The lawyer opened the door to his little office, where he had confessed many a man, and without a word pointed to a chair beside his littered desk. Then he sat down and waited, examining the architect's face with his dispassionate eyes.

"Everett, I wanted to see you about something," Hart began. Then he stopped as though surprised by his own voice, which sounded far away, unfamiliar, and unused. The lawyer waited a moment for him to continue, and then he asked in his indifferent manner:—

"So you wanted to see me?"

"Yes, I want to tell you something," Jackson began again.

The lawyer wheeled toward his desk, and picked up a little silver letter-opener, which he fingered.

"About that fire?" he asked.

"Yes—that and other things."

Wheeler went to the door, closed it, and returning to his chair, wheeled his face away from his cousin.

"Well, what about it?"

"You know—you saw it in the papers—how the Glenmore burned? It was one of Graves's buildings, and I did the plans for him. Well, the newspapers were right; there was crooked work. The plans were all altered after they had been through the building department. Graves is in with the whole gang over there. He has all the inspectors in his pocket."

Then Hart paused again. He was not saying what he came there to tell. His mind seemed strangely unreliant and confused. While he stumbled, the frown on his cousin's face deepened into an ugly crease between the eyes. It said as plainly as words, "What in hell do you come here for, blabbing this to me?" Jackson, reading the look, caught himself and continued more steadily:—

"But I didn't come here to talk of the fire. It's about the school. Pemberton was right about that. It was crooked, too. I want to tell you what I know about that."

Wheeler put down the letter-opener and rested his chin on the tips of his fingers. The architect told his story slowly, without excitement, trying to give all the details and the exact figures, busying himself with being precise. The matter was complicated, and it led him to speak again of the hotel and of other affairs, of his entire connection with the contractor,—to tell the complete story of his business career in the city. The lawyer did not try to stop him, although his face betrayed no special interest or desire to comment.

"Well, the upshot of the matter is," Hart ended, "that I am through with the whole business, Everett. I am going to get out of it somehow and square what I can. And first, I wanted you to know the truth about the school, and to take this for the trustees."

He laid on the desk a large, fat envelope, which he had filled that morning from his safety deposit box.

"There's about thirty thousand there, in stocks and bonds and some land. I thought I wouldn't wait to put it into cash," he explained. "It's pretty nearly all I have got, Everett. Part of that stock in the Glenmore which Graves gave me represented my legitimate commission on the building, but I have put that in, too. You can force Graves to make good the rest. I can figure out for you what he should pay. And I'll do what I can to help you make him do the right thing. If you can't get hold of Graves, why, I'm ready to give you my personal note for the rest and pay it as soon as I can."

Wheeler poked the envelope on the desk without taking it up.

"Conscience money?" he remarked slowly. "I don't want your wad. I wish you had chucked it in the river, done anything with it but brought it here, fixed that matter up once, didn't I?"

Hart was able to realize the contempt, the ironical humor, with which the lawyer's tone was charged, and his lips tightened. But he made no reply. After the experiences of the last two days he cared little for what his cousin might say or think. In some manner he had passed completely outside of the world where such matters counted. He was for the time dulled to all but a few considerations.

"Say," the lawyer iterated, "I thought we'd closed that little matter for good. But I can tell you there's one person who'll be tickled," he laughed disgustedly. "And that's old Pemberton. He thought you were a scamp from the word go. Now he'll be well set up when the judge tells him this. He'll take an irreligious pleasure in it."

Jackson said nothing, and the two men faced each other sombrely. Finally the lawyer exclaimed:—

"So you lost your nerve!"

It had not presented itself to the architect in that way, and he winced perceptibly as he replied:—

"Well, you can call it that. And I guess that if you had seen those people dropping into that burning building, and known what I knew about the way it was put together— Well, what's the use of talking! I am done with the whole thing—done with it for good."

The lawyer eyed him sharply, unsympathetically, curious, in a cold manner, of the psychology of the man before him. Hart's sturdy body, which was a trifle inclined to fleshiness, seemed to have shrunken and to be loose in his clothes. The bones of his jaw came out heavily in his unshaven face, and below his eyes the skin was black, shading into gray. His tweed office suit was rumpled out of shape, and there were signs of the muddy roads on his trousers and boots. Usually so careful and tidy in dress, he seemed to have lost for once all consciousness of his appearance.

Wheeler had never felt much respect for his cousin as a young man. Then the lawyer considered him to be somewhat "light-weight," given to feminine interests in art and literature, feeling himself to be above his homely American environment. But since their uncle's death Jackson had won his approval by the practical ability he had shown in pushing his way in the Chicago world, in getting together a flourishing business, and making a success of his profession. Now that there was revealed to him the uncertain means by which this outward success had been obtained, he reverted easily to his earlier judgment. The man was really a light-weight, a weakling, he concluded. The lawyer despised weaklings; they made the real troubles in this life. He could not see to its depth the tragedy before him, even as the stern Pemberton might have seen it. He merely saw another nasty mess, a scandal that would probably get about the city, even if his cousin and the contractor escaped the Grand Jury for this Glenmore affair. He had little use for men who went wrong and "lost their nerve."

"Well," he said at last, "you needn't bother about that note just yet. You'll have troubles enough for one while, I expect. I suppose I shall have to take this, though,"—he tapped the fat envelope,—"and lay the matter before the trustees. I'll let you know what they decide to do."

"All right," Hart answered. As he did not rise immediately from his chair, the lawyer turned to his desk with an air of dismissal. When the architect at last got wearily to his feet, Wheeler asked, without looking up:—

"Have you seen that man Graves this morning?"

"No, I went to the bank and then came here the first thing."

"He was in here to see me late yesterday. He seemed afraid that you might split on him in this Glenmore business."

Hart listened, his eyes looking over his cousin's head far out through the office window, his mind concerned with other matters.

"Hadn't you better get out of the city for a few weeks?" the lawyer suggested casually. "Take a vacation. You seem to need a rest, bad. The papers'll quiet down after a while—they always do," he added explanatorily.

As a matter of fact, he had promised the contractor that he would do what he could to keep Hart from making any trouble. It was obviously best for the architect to be out of sight for the present, in some safe place where he could not be got at for awkward explanations.

"I've been thinking of going away for a few days," Jackson replied slowly, a flush spreading over his pallid face. "I'm going on to the Falls to see Helen. But I shan't hide, if that's what you mean. They can find me when they want me. And I shall be back before long, anyway."

Wheeler did not tell him that the coroner had already formed his jury, and that the first inquiry into the Glenmore fire was to begin the next day. If the architect had made up his mind to go to Vermont, it was just as well that he should get away before he could be summoned by the coroner.

"Well," he said, taking another look at his cousin, "whatever you do, get your nerve together. Men like you shouldn't play with fire. They'd better stick to the straight game."

The architect knew well enough what that meant. If he had been some cunning promoter who had had the wit to swindle the public out of any sum of money that ran into the millions, or if he had been some banker who had known how to ruin the credit of an enterprise which he wished to buy cheaply, Wheeler would have extended to him a cynical tolerance, and if his honesty were questioned, would have admitted merely that "there were stories about, of course—there always were stories when a man was smart enough to make some money quick." But, unfortunately, he belonged to the category of unsuccessful, petty criminals, and he "had lost his nerve."

He realized all this, and yet in the wreck which he had made of his life, he was indifferent to the world's injustice. What men thought or said about him had marvellously little importance just now. This crisis had wonderfully simplified life for him; he saw a few things which must be done, and to these he was setting himself with a slow will. His face, as he gazed down at his cousin, held new, grave lines, which gave it a sort of manliness that it had not possessed before.

"You'd better see Graves before you leave, and get together on this thing," Wheeler concluded. "You won't do any good by making a bad matter worse and spreading the stink, you know."

"I can't see any use in talking with Graves," Jackson protested slowly. "I saw him yesterday and told him my views. He made me the treasurer of his company, and I was the architect for the building. If they get me up and ask me questions—why, I shall tell what I know about it. That's all there is to that."

"Well, we'll see about that when the time comes," the lawyer replied, and then asked bluntly:—

"Are you going to tell Helen the whole story, too?"

"Yes. That's why I'm going down there." The architect's face turned red with humiliation for the first time since he had begun his story.

"I suppose she'll have to know," Wheeler admitted softly. "It will cut her pretty deep."

He was wondering whether she could forgive this weak fellow, crawling back to her now, his courage gone, broken for life, as he judged. He suspected that she might pardon him even now, though she had left him inexplicably. She would forgive her husband when he was at the end of his rope; she was made that way. The softness of character in such women irritated him, for the moment. There were other women whom he liked and admired less than her,—Mrs. Phillips was one,—who would not tolerate a flabby sinner like this man. But to Helen, disgrace would make little difference, perhaps would cause her to cling more closely to the dishonored man. And he was sorry for it all, because he loved the woman, and he could feel her tragedy, though he was impervious to the man's.

"Women have bum luck sometimes," he reflected aloud. "They have to take all the man's troubles as well as their own." Then he added not unkindly: "You had better think well what it means to her and to the children before you do anything to make matters worse. I'll keep an eye on what goes on here and let you know if you're needed—if you can do any good."

Neither offered to shake hands, and Hart went out of the office without replying to the last remark. In the vestibule of the building he hesitated a moment, as if to get his bearings, and then slowly walked down the crowded street in the direction of his office. The city sights were curiously foreign to him, as if he had come back to them after a long period of absence. The jostle of human beings on the pavement, the roar of the streets, were like the meaningless gyrations of a machine. With a repugnance that weighted his steps, he turned in at the door of his building and crowded into one of the cages that were swallowing and disgorging their human burdens in the mid-forenoon. In his office there had settled an air of listless idleness, now that Cook, the mainspring of the place, was no longer at his post. Without looking at the accumulated mail on his desk, Hart called the stenographer and dictated to her some instructions for his partner, Stewart, who had just landed in New York on his way home from a vacation in Europe. The girl received his dictation with an offish, impertinent glance in her eyes that said, "Something's wrong with this place, I guess." When the architect had finished, she said:—

"Say, Graves was in here twice this morning and wanted me to let him know as soon as you came in. He wanted to know where you were. What shall I say to him?"

Hart thought a moment before replying. He did not wish to see the contractor,—that was very clear,—and yet he was unwilling to seem to run away, to avoid the man. Moreover, he realized vaguely since his talk with his cousin that there was a certain claim in complicity. There was trouble ahead for them both, surely, and Graves had his right to be considered.

"If Mr. Graves calls, bring him in here," he said to the stenographer, as he turned to his mail.

He had some final matters to attend to, and then he should take the train. If the contractor came back before he got away, he would see him. Half an hour later, while he was still tearing open his letters and jotting notes for the answers, his door opened and Graves walked in. He had less assurance than on the afternoon before; the strain of the situation was beginning to tell even on his coarse fibre.

"So you've come to!" he exclaimed with an attempt to be at his ease, taking a chair beside the desk.

"What do you want?" the architect demanded sharply.

"Say, did you see the papers this morning?" Graves asked, ignoring the question.

Hart shook his head; he had no curiosity to know what the newspapers were saying.

"They're making an awful kick, worse than I expected. It's mostly politics, of course. They've got the mayor on the run already. He's suspended the head of the department, and Bloom was a good friend of mine. That'll scare the rest considerable. And then there's talk of bringing civil suits against the hotel company and the officers individually."

He paused to see what impression this news might make on the architect.

"They can't get much out of me," Hart answered quietly. "I turned over to Wheeler pretty nearly every dollar I have got. That's on account of the school business," he added, thinking the contractor would not comprehend rightly his meaning. "It came out of the school and might as well go back to the trustees."

Graves stared at him in disgust. He had had some idea of forcing the architect to pay part of the expense of "keeping the City Hall quiet." Now the man had outwitted him and put his money beyond his reach.

"So you've seen Mr. Wheeler?"

"Just come from there."

"He told you he'd help us out of this hole?"

"We didn't discuss it."

"I've seen to Meyer myself. He's where he can't do no harm. And I guess it's all right over there,"—he pointed with his thumb in the direction of the city hall,—"though it'll cost a sight of money if those fellers lose their jobs. Now, if we keep quiet, they can't do nothing but bring their suits for damages. I ain't afraid of that."

"I suppose not," Hart replied dryly. "It doesn't touch you. They're all straw names in the corporation papers but mine, aren't they?"

"Just now there's this damned coroner," Graves went on, ignoring the last remark. "The inquest begins to-morrow. He'll try to fix the blame, of course, and hold some one to the Grand Jury. He's got to, to quiet the papers."

"I suppose so," Hart assented wearily.

"But they've got nothing to go on if you only hold your tongue," Graves ripped out incautiously. "And you've got to hold your jaw!"

The man's dictatorial manner angered the architect. He rose hastily from his desk, gathering some papers and putting them into his bag.

"I told you yesterday, Graves, that I would have nothing more to do with you in this Glenmore business. I don't see what you came in here for. Let them go ahead and do what they can. I'll stand for my share of the trouble."

"You—" Graves burst out. "You—"

"I've got an engagement now, Mr. Graves, and there's no use in our talking this matter over any more."

He reached for his coat and hat.

"But I tell you, Hart, that you can't be a quitter in this business. Didn't your cousin tell you that, too?"

"It makes no difference to me what he might say," Hart retorted doggedly, holding open the door into the hall.

"I'll smash you, sure thing, if you do me up in this dirty way!"

The contractor crossed the room to where Hart stood, as if he meant to strike then and there. Hart looked at him indifferently. The man disgusted and irritated him; he wondered how he could ever have submitted himself to him. He held the door open, and Graves passed out into the hall, which was empty.

"I'll smash you!" he repeated, less loudly.

"All right!" the architect muttered. "I guess that won't matter much now."

Graves kept by his side in the elevator, and followed him out into the street.

"Say! Step over to Burke's place with me," he urged in a more conciliatory tone.

"See here!" the architect answered, stopping on the sidewalk. "It's no use talking, Graves, I've done with you and your methods. Can't you see that? I don't intend to get you into trouble if I can help it. But I don't mean to sneak out of this or tell any lies to save your hide. I'm on my way out of the city now, to see my family, and shall be away for a few days. Wheeler knows where I shall be, and he'll let me know when I am wanted. They won't get around to me for some little time yet, probably. If they summon me, why, I suppose I shall come back."

The contractor, hearing that Hart was about to leave the city, felt relieved for the moment. It would be easier to deal with his cousin, the lawyer, who might be able to keep the architect from making a fool of himself. So he walked on with Hart toward the station in a calmer frame of mind. As if he realized the mistake he had made in trying to bully his accomplice, he began to put forward his personal difficulties apologetically.

"This fire has hit me hard. Of course the Glenmore will be a dead loss, and the banks have begun to call my loans. Then it'll take a lot of ready money to keep those fellers over there quiet, in case the Grand Jury takes a hand. I was just getting where I couldn't be touched when this fire came, and now I shall have to begin over pretty nearly. You don't know, Hart, what hard sledding it's been to build up my business with nothing back of me to start on."

The architect realized that Graves was making an appeal to his sympathies, and although the wheedling tone, so unlike the man's usual blustering self-confidence, roused his contempt, he began to see more dispassionately the contractor's point of view. The man was fighting for his life, and there could be nothing reasonable to him in a determination to make a bad matter worse. For no amount of truth now could save those hapless victims of greed who had lost their lives in the wretched building.

"I don't want to ruin my family no more than you do, Mr. Hart," the contractor persisted. "And you can't make me so much trouble as you will yourself. You can see that," he added meaningly.

Hart turned on the man angrily:—

"I have heard about enough, Graves! It's no use your going on. I tell you I mean to come back and stand my share of the trouble—yes—if it breaks me! Do you hear? If it breaks me! Now good day."

The contractor turned away, scowling like a dog that had been kicked into the street. Hart hurried into the station and bought his ticket. He had not looked up his eastern connections, remembering merely that Helen had left Chicago by this road, and he took the first train east in his overwhelming desire to get to her, to tell her all, to submit. And already, as the heavy train moved slowly out of the station, he felt strangely relieved from the perplexities of the morning. The unconscious physical influence of mere motion, of going somewhere, soothed his irritated nerves.

He had been goaded into his final declaration to the contractor, for he had felt the ground slipping from his resolution under the persistent appeals of the man. As the train shot out into the prairie, however, he turned the matter over in his mind again and again, trying to consider it in all its varying aspects. After all, was it necessary that he should come back as he had said in his first singleness of resolution and bring on himself and his family the shame and disgrace of public exposure? He comforted himself with the thought that he had the courage to tell his story, that in leaving the city he was not merely running away to escape the consequences of his connivance with fraud. Yes, he could go back—if it were necessary; but for the time being he put the question out of his mind. While the train moved across the states, his heart grew calmer, stronger; whatever might be the outcome, he knew that his instinct had been right—that he had done well to go first to his wife. Then, whatever might seem best, he could bring himself somehow to do it.

CHAPTER XXIX

The old Jackson homestead at Vernon Falls was a high, narrow, colonial house with three gables. Upon the broad terrace facing the south side there was a row of graceful, "wineglass" elms. Below the terrace stretched a broad, level meadow, which was marked irregularly by a dark line where a little brook wandered, and beyond the meadow passed the white road to Verulam, the nearest station. From this highway a lane led through copses of alder and birch along the east side of the meadow to the old house, which was withdrawn nearly an eighth of a mile from the public road.

It was an austere, silent, lonely place. Powers Jackson, during the last years of his life, had built a great barn and sheds behind the house with the purpose of making a stock farm, but since his death these had been shut up. He had also built along the terrace a broad veranda, which contrasted strangely with the weather-beaten, hand-made clapboards of the old building. The gaunt, lofty house seemed to be drawing itself away disdainfully from this frivolous addition at its base.

Jackson had often spent his long vacations at the farm with his mother when he was at college. Yet that April afternoon, when he came upon it from the bend in the Verulam road, it seemed to him singularly unreal. His memories of the house and the meadow in front of it had grown and flowered, until in his imagination it had become a spot of tender, aristocratic grace, a harmony of swaying elm branches and turfy lawn, lichened stone walls and marvellous gray clapboards. To-day it rose bare and severe across the brown meadow, unrelieved by the leafless branches of the elms that crisscrossed the south front. The slanting sun struck the little panes of the upper windows, and made them blaze with a mysterious, intensely yellow fire. Involuntarily his pace slackened as he turned from the highroad into the lane. The place appeared strangely silent, deserted. Was Helen there in the old house? Could she understand? Could she forgive him? ...

The northern spring had barely begun. It was cold, grudging, tentative, scarcely touching the brown meadow with faint green. Hiding its charm, like the delicate first bloom of Puritan women, it gave an uncertain promise of future performance—of a hidden, reticent beauty.

Jackson lingered in the lane, watching the sun fade from the window panes, until the air suddenly became chill and the scene was blank. Then, as he stepped on toward the house, he caught sight of a woman's figure stooping in the thicket beside the road. His heart began suddenly to beat, telling him, almost before his eyes had recognized the bent figure, that this was his wife. She looked up at last, and seeing him coming toward her, rose and stood there, her hands filled with the tendrils of some plant that she had been plucking up by its roots, her face troubled and disturbed.

"Nell!" he called as he came nearer, "Nell!"

And then he stopped, baffled. For long hours on the train he had thought what he should say when he met her, but now his premeditated words seemed to him futile. He saw the gulf that might lie between them forever, and he looked hesitatingly into her troubled face. She was wonderfully, newly beautiful. Her hair was parted in the middle and rippled loosely over the temples to the ears, in the way she had worn it as a girl, a fashion which he had laughed her out of. She had grown larger, ampler, these last months, and in her linen dress, with its flat collar revealing the white neck, without ornament of any sort, her features came out strong and distinct. That curve of the upper lip, which had always made the face appealing, no longer trembled at the touch of emotion. There was a repression and mature self-command about her, as if, having been driven back upon her own heart, she had recovered possession of herself once more, and no longer belonged to a man. She was beautiful, wholly woman, and yet to her husband waiting there she seemed to be his no longer.

"Nell," he began once more, still standing at a little distance from her, "I have come here to you, as you said."

Her arms hung limply at her sides, with the trailing plant drooping across her skirt, as though, thus taken by surprise, she were waiting for him to declare himself. He stepped nearer quickly, his heart sick with the fear that, after all, it was too late, that she had passed beyond his reach.

"You know what I mean! I have come to tell you that you were right when you went away. You were right all along, and I have been wrong."

But as he spoke she reached out her arms to him, beseeching him, drawing him to her, in commiseration for him. She put her arms on his shoulders, clasping them behind his neck, thus drawing him and holding him from her at the same time. Her lips trembled, and her breath fluttered as she looked into his eyes....

"Francis! Francis!" she murmured, holding him a little from her when he tried to take her in his arms....

And in her eyes and trembling mouth he knew that she could forgive him; but he felt strangely humble and little beside her. He saw himself in her eyes as he had never seen himself before. Slowly she drew him to her and kissed his lips, tenderly, unpassionately.

"The boys are over there by the brook," she said, nodding across the meadow.

They sat down on the crumbling stone wall to wait for them, and presently, catching sight of their father, they came tumbling over the wall with cries of "Dad, it's dad—he's come!" and together they all went on to the house.

Mrs. Spellman received her son-in-law in her equable, unknowing manner, as if she had expected him to arrive on that day. After supper she took the boys to their room while husband and wife sat in the west parlor, which the architect remembered just as it was this day, with the same faded drab carpet, the brass fire-irons, and worn furniture. The high-backed walnut writing-table stood in its familiar corner beside the window. Outside, a drooping elm branch swept softly across the glass pane. Nothing here was altered, nothing added, save the new lives of the modern generation. They watched the leaping flames lick the fire-eaten bricks of the old fireplace for a time, and then he turned to her with a sigh:—

"Now I must tell you the whole story, Nell."

"Yes," she answered, letting her hand fall softly on his arm. "Tell me everything."

And he began slowly to tell her the story as he had lived through it that night when he lay exhausted on the earth beneath the stars—the story of his work in the city, of the acts which for eight years he had hidden from all, even himself. He explained as well as he could the tangled web of his dealings with the contractor from the day when he had met him in the Canostota until the time of the arrangement over the school and the hotel. When he came to the end, to the horrible fire which had licked up the fraudulent Glenmore before his own eyes, hot tears fell upon his hands, which his wife held tightly in hers, and he could feel her body tremble against his.

"And that was the end! It made me see in one flash what it all meant. Of course, those men and women might have been caught anyway, no matter how well the building was put up,—there's no telling,—and Graves would have done the same job whether I had been in with him or not. Still, that doesn't count. When I saw them there, trapped, fighting helplessly for their lives, I felt as if I had stood by and let them be murdered—and made money by it, too!"

The horror of those minutes revived as he went over the story, and he paused wearily.

"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."

It seemed a pitifully trivial act, now that he had told it, yet 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 didn't get it, I went in to make a big success and have the things I was after, anyhow. I saw men out there 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!"

Nevertheless she did not despise him as she might have despised him at the time of their marriage for his sordid soul. During 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 desirable. And she had come to realize that to stand firmly against this current of the day demanded a heat of nature, a character that the man she had married and worshipped, 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 leaned toward him and 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 for her 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.

CHAPTER XXX

The next day and the next went by in the peace of the old house. Now that the event which had so wholly occupied the man'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 personally 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 picture to himself well enough the ferocious glee with which the Thunderer would receive his evidence! Was it necessary to give his wife and his children into the merciless hands of the malicious newspapers?

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, also, 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. As far as the coroner's inquest was concerned, it was a public farce,—trial by newspaper,—and it would be well to wait and see whether the affair was to reach a responsible court. 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 before he left the city. 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 immediately by an editorial caption:—

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GLENMORE TRAGEDY?

The article was a sarcastic summary of the results thus far from the inquest, done in the Thunderer's best manner. So far, the editorial writer pointed out, the inquiry had been confined to examining chambermaids, bell-boys, and the police, and to quarrelling 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 so often shielded themselves. Of the officers whose names appeared in the papers of incorporation, three were clerks in the employ of a contractor named Graves, who had built the hotel, 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 sooner or later. You see I was not only the architect, but 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 doesn'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. Then, if the Grand Jury found a true bill against him, whenever he returned to Chicago he could be tried for manslaughter. But even if in his absence he should be held to the Grand Jury, there were many steps in the complex machinery of legal justice, and he could probably escape without trial. Evidently Wheeler, who knew the involutions of the district attorney's office, was counting on the probability that no one would be brought to trial in this hotel case,—that the disaster would be buried in that gulf of abortive justice where crimes against the people at large are smothered.

"And in that case," Hart concluded, "there would be no use in letting them tear me to pieces in the papers!"

"But you must go back!" she exclaimed, brushing aside his reasoning. "You must tell them all you know!"

"Everett doesn't think so," he protested, "and I can't see the good of it, either. They won't do anything, probably. It's just politics, the whole investigation. But the newspapers are full of it just now, and they would hound me to a finish. It would be impossible for me to get work in Chicago for a long time, if ever again. And it would cover you and the boys with disgrace—that's the worst! I have paid enough!"

"But it must be done," she repeated in a low voice.

She was not clear what good might come of his testimony: she was ignorant of the legal conditions. But she had a fundamental sense of justice: men must pay for the evil they do,—pay fully and pay publicly. A private repentance and a private penance were to her incomplete and trivial.

"I've got to earn our living," he urged. "You must think of that! If I am shut out of Chicago, we must begin somewhere else at the bottom."

She was not ready yet to consider that question.

"You mustn't think of us," she answered. "Francis, you can't really pay for all the wrong that has been done. But perhaps the truth will do some good. And unless you are ready to face the open disgrace,—why, you have done nothing! The money you gave back to the trustees was nothing. This is the only way!"

It was the only way for him, at least. With his buoyant, pliant nature, as she understood it, some final act, definite, done in the eyes of the world that knew him, was needed to strengthen the fibre of his being, to record in his own soul its best resolve. For already he had begun to waver, to quibble with his repentance.

He had been ready enough in the stress of his first feeling after the catastrophe to stand before the world and confess his share in the wrong that had been done. Then he was eager to free his mind of its intolerable burden. But now that the excitement had faded, leaving him to face the difficulties of his future, he saw in all its fatal detail what public disgrace would mean, and he drew back. It was folly to invite ruin!

Yet in the end the woman held him to her ideal. Late that night he consented to telegraph Wheeler of his immediate return, and to take the first train on the morrow for the west, there to await the coroner's summons.

"I shall go on with you, of course," she said. "We will all go,—the boys, too. Mamma will stay and close the house. Perhaps you can't get away very soon after it is over. And I want to be there with you," she answered to all his objections.

"You know what it will mean!" he exclaimed warningly, as the last log burst into ashes on the hearth. "Nell, it's worst for you and the boys. It means ruin, nothing less!"

"Never!" she protested with flashing eyes. "Other people, the newspapers, can't make ruin. Ruin is in ourselves. It merely means that we shall have to do without friends, and society, and things, especially things. And I have come to hate things. They make one small and mean. I never thought we should have them, when we were married. And I don't want them for the boys, either. There is work! the best thing in life,—work for itself, without pay in things, without bribes! We'll have that and bread, Francis!"

"But the public disgrace," he objected, still sensitive to the opinion of the world in which he had lived.

"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, Nell!" 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 really 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 blank 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, however, 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 with Mrs. Ollie B. 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. Of course, it was a crushing blow to poor mamma,—she put her sailing forward a whole week to escape from her friends. She was positively growing 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 guess: 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 quite right. We are to be married any time, when he finishes up the 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 putting the place in order as it is to be rented to some awful people, whom you never heard of. By the way, the doctor isn'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. He means to earn enough for a sensible woman to live on, he says, and if I am not content with what he chooses to do for me 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 I am afraid 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 was with you now. My love to the Prodigal Man. Good-by, dear...

"Isn't it good!" Helen exclaimed, with the readiness of good women to welcome a newcomer to that state which has brought them such doubtful happiness.

"I shouldn't think he would have been the man to satisfy her," Jackson answered slowly.

"I think Dr. Coburn has changed a good deal since you knew him. He had fine things in him, and Venetia could see them."

"I always thought she was ambitious, and the reason she didn't marry was because she couldn't find any one out there to give her everything she was after."

"Perhaps Venetia has seen enough already of that kind of thing!"

CHAPTER XXXI

There was a stir among the reporters gathered in the little room where the coroner's inquest on the Glenmore fire was being held, when it became known that the architect was present and was to be examined. Graves's man, Gotz, the president of the hotel company, had finished his testimony on the previous day, having displayed a marvellous capacity for ignorance. Under advice from his employer's lawyer he had refused to answer every important question put to him, on the plea that it was irrelevant. The coroner had been scarcely more successful with other witnesses in his endeavors to determine the exact causes for the large loss of life in the new hotel, and his inquest was closing in failure. The yelping pack of newspapers had already raised their cry in another field; public interest in the Glenmore disaster had begun to wane; and it was generally believed that nothing would come of the inquest, not even a hearing before the Grand Jury. The whole affair appeared to be but another instance of the impotence of our system of government in getting at the real offenders against society, if they are cunning and powerful.

That morning, as the Harts were preparing to go to the hearing the doctor had called to see little Powers, for the child's feverish cold threatened to develop into pneumonia. After the doctor had gone, the architect went upstairs to the sickroom, where Helen was seated on the bed playing with Powers, and trying to soothe him. As he stood there silently watching them, he was tormented by a sudden fear, a terrible presentiment, that the child was to die, and thus he was to pay for his sins, and not only he, but Helen. She was to pay with him, even more than he! He tried to rid himself of the hysterical and foolish idea, but it persisted, prompted by that rough sense of retribution—an acknowledgment of supreme justice—that most men retain all their lives.

"I shall have to go now," he said to her at last. "But you mustn't think of coming. You must stay with the boy."

"Oh, no!" Helen exclaimed quickly, looking closely at the child. "The doctor says there is nothing to fear yet. Everything has been done that I can do, and your mother will stay with him while we are away. It won't be long, anyway!"

"Why do you insist upon coming?" he protested almost irritably. "It won't be exactly pleasant, and you may have to hang around there for hours."

"Don't you want me to go with you, and be there, Francis?" she asked a little sadly.

He made no reply, feeling ashamed to confess that it would make the coming scene all the more painful to know that she was hearing again in all its repulsive detail the story of his participation in the criminal construction of the Glenmore hotel.

"I think I had better go," she said finally, "and I want to go!"

She wished to be near him at the end, after he had performed this difficult act; to be near him when he came out from the hearing and walked home with the knowledge of the public disgrace preparing for him at the hands of the hungry reporters. Then, she divined, would come upon him the full bitterness of his position.

The hearing proceeded slowly, and it was the middle of the afternoon before the architect was called. The coroner, a grizzled little German-American with an important manner, put on his spectacles to examine the new witness, and the members of the coroner's jury, who knew that the architect had left the city immediately after the fire and were surprised at his return, evinced their curiosity by leaning forward and staring at Hart.

The first questions put to him were directed toward gaining information about the corporation that owned the building. As Mr. Hart was the treasurer of the Glenmore company, presumably he held stock in the corporation? A large amount? No, he had had some stock, but had disposed of it. Recently? Some time ago. To whom? The witness refused to answer. Had he paid cash for his stock? The witness refused to answer: he had been told by his lawyer that all such questions were not pertinent to the present inquiry. But who, then, were the chief stockholders? who were, in fact, the Glenmore company? Again the architect refused to answer; indeed, he was not sure that he knew. The coroner, baffled on this line, and knowing well enough in a general way at least from previous witnesses that nothing was to be unearthed here, turned to more vital matters.

"Mr. Hart," he said, clearing his throat and looking gravely at the witness, "I understand that you were the architect for this hotel?"

"Yes."

"You drew the plans and specifications for the Glenmore?"

"Yes, they were prepared in my office."

"Were they the same that you see here?"

The coroner motioned toward the roll of plans that had been taken from the files of the Building Department.

"Yes," the architect answered readily, merely glancing at the plans, "those were the plans for the hotel as originally prepared by me."

"Now I want to ask if the Glenmore hotel was built according to these plans?"

The architect hesitated. Every one in the room knew well enough by this time that the building destroyed by fire had not been erected according to these plans, but, nevertheless, they waited eagerly for the reply.

"Few buildings," Hart began explanatorily, "are completed in all respects according to the original plans and specifications."

"Ah, is that so?"

"But these plans were very considerably altered," the witness continued voluntarily.

"By whom? By you? With your consent, your approval?"

The architect hesitated again for a few moments, and then answered rapidly:—

"With my knowledge, certainly; yes, you may say with my consent!"

There was a little delay in the inquiry at this point, while the coroner consulted with his counsel as to the next questions that should be addressed to the witness. The architect gazed doggedly before him, keeping his eyes on the dirty window above the heads of the jury. In the dingy light of the little room, his face appeared yellow and old. His mouth twitched occasionally beneath his mustache, but otherwise he stood with composure waiting for the next question, which he knew would pierce to the heart of the matter.

"Mr. Hart," the coroner resumed, "will you describe to us what those alterations in the plans for the Glenmore were, what was the nature of them?"

The witness considered how he was to answer the question, and then he proceeded to explain the most important discrepancies between the building as it had been erected by Graves and the plans that had been filed with the Building Department. He described the use of the old walls and foundations, the reduction in the thickness of the bearing-walls and partitions, the chief substitutions of wood for steel in the upper stories, the omitting of fireproof partitions and fire-escapes, etc.,—in short, all the methods of "skinning" the construction, in which the contractor was such an adept. He referred from time to time to the plans, and used technical terms, which he was asked to explain. But the jury listened with absorbed interest, and he kept on until he had answered the question thoroughly.

"As an architect," the coroner asked, when Hart had completed his explanation, "will you state whether, in your judgment, these changes that you have described, especially the substitution of inflammable material for fireproofing and the weakening of the main walls, were sufficient to account for the great loss of life in the fire?"

The answer to such a question could be only speculative,—an individual opinion,—and the witness might properly refuse to commit himself. The architect hesitated, and then with a quick motion of the head, as if he were sick of evasions, said:—

"There are a good many buildings here in Chicago and in other large cities that are no safer than the Glenmore was. But if you want my opinion, I will say that such alterations as I have indicated tended to weaken the walls, and in other ways to bring the building below the danger limit."

"It was what might be called a fire-trap, then?"

"I did not say that!"

Feeling that at last he had found an easy witness, the coroner began to bully, and there ensued a wrangle between him and the architect, in which both men became heated.

"Well, Mr. Hart," a member of the jury finally interposed with a question, "can you say that the Glenmore as it was built conformed to the building ordinances of the city of Chicago?"

"It would take a number of experts and a good lawyer to interpret those ordinances!" the architect answered testily. "I should say that they were drawn for the express purpose of being violated."

There was a laugh along the reporters' bench at this retort. But the witness quickly added in his former contained manner:—

"No, the Glenmore violated the ordinances in a number of important particulars."

There was a sudden hush in the room. This point had been established before by different persons who had been examined. Nevertheless, the admission coming from the architect of the ill-fated building was an important point. It might lead to other interesting admissions.

"You were aware, then, when the Glenmore was being erected that it violated the ordinances?"

"Yes."

"Did you make any protest?"

"No."

"Did you know when you undertook the plans that the hotel was to be built in this manner?"

"I knew that it was to be put up for a certain sum, and that a first-class fire-proof building conforming to the ordinances could not be built for that money."

A number of questions followed in regard to the actual cost of the hotel and the connection of the Graves Construction Company with the owners of the building, many of which the architect refused to answer. At last the coroner returned to the one point on which he had been successful in eliciting vital information,—the character of the burned building, and the circumstances of its construction.

"I suppose the building was inspected during the construction?"

"Certainly."

"By whom?"

"As usual, by different inspectors from the building department. Mr. Murphy was there several times, I remember, and Mr. Lagrange, among others. But I think chiefly Mr. Murphy."

"Were you present during their inspection?"

"Not always."

"Did either of these gentlemen find anything to object to in the method of construction?"

"I never heard of any objection. Nothing was ever said to me. The inspectors might have talked to the contractors. But I don't think any one of them did."

"Have you reason to believe that there was any collusion between the inspectors and the Graves Company?"

Every one in the room knew that there must have been collusion. Nevertheless, the architect, after hesitation, said:—

"I shan't answer that, sir."

"You refuse to reply?"

"See here, Mr. Coroner! I am here to tell you what I know about the Glenmore,—at least so far as it concerns my own responsibility, my own work. But I am not here to testify against the Graves Construction Company. Understand that!"

"Well, I should say that you and the Graves Company were pretty well mixed in this matter. You were an officer of the corporation which employed the Graves Company to build a hotel on your plans. Could there be any closer connection than that, do you think?"

To this observation Hart made no reply, and finally the member of the jury who had interposed before put another question to the witness:—

"You have told us that the Glenmore was not properly built, was not what it pretended to be, a fire-proof building, and generally violated the ordinance for that class of building. Do you consider yourself in any way responsible for those violations?"

"Yes," the architect replied slowly, "I suppose so. At least I knew all about it!"

"You considered it a dangerous building?"

"I can't say that I did. I should consider it so now. I didn't think much about it then."

The witness's admission came with evident effort; the juryman continued insinuatingly:—

"Mr. Hart, I believe that you were present at the fire?"

"Yes."

"Did you then believe that if the hotel had been built according to these plans"—he pointed to the roll of blue prints on the table—"the large loss of life would not have occurred?"

"I felt so,—yes, I believe so now!"

"May I ask one more question? Was it for your interest to make these changes? Did you make any money out of the job beyond your customary commission?"

It was a question that the witness might properly refuse to answer as having no direct bearing on the object of the inquest. But the architect was weary of quibbles,—indeed, eager to make his testimony as thorough as might be, and to have it over.

"Not directly, but I was an officer of the company, and beside—"

"Indirectly, then, you benefited?"

"Yes, indirectly."

"That is all, Mr. Hart."

A few more questions were asked by the coroner about the inspection of the building by Murphy and Lagrange, and also in regard to the architect's previous relations with the Graves Company. Then the witness was excused.

When the architect stepped back into the room, he saw Wheeler sitting beside Helen in the rear. They waited for him at the door, and together the three went out to the street. The lawyer, who had reached the hearing in time for most of the testimony, smiled rather grimly as he remarked to his cousin:—

"Well, Jack, you gave them about everything they were after! You needn't have turned yourself quite inside out."

"It was perfect!" Helen exclaimed, taking her husband's arm. "Everything you said was right. I wouldn't have had you change a word."

Wheeler buttoned his coat against the east wind and smiled tolerantly at the woman's fervor.

"Will that be all, Everett?" she asked a little defiantly.

"For the present," he replied after a pause, and then he nodded good-by.

"What did he mean?" she asked her husband, as they threaded the crowded street leading to the North Side bridge.

"That they will hold me to the Grand Jury, I suppose."

Her hand which clasped his arm tightened involuntarily at the words, and they continued their way silently to the old Ohio Street house.

CHAPTER XXXII

When they entered the house, Helen hurried upstairs to the child, who had been calling for her, Mrs. Hart said. Presently the doctor came for his evening visit, and when, after a long time, he left the sickroom, Jackson met him in the hall, but lacked the courage to ask any question. The doctor spoke bruskly about the bad weather, and hurried off. Then Hart walked to and fro in the gloomy dining-room until his mother came down for dinner, which they ate in silence.

Before they had finished their meal the bell rang, and in reply to the maid's excuses at the door there sounded in the hall a strong woman's voice.

"But I must see them!"

Jackson, recognizing Venetia Phillips's voice, stepped into the hall.

"Oh, Jack! I have just heard that you were all here. We met Everett at the station, and he told me all about it. Jack, it was fine! I didn't think you had it in you, Jackie, dear. To stand up there and give everything away,—it took real stuff. I know it!" She held out her hand in enthusiastic heartiness, repeating, "It was fine, fine!" Suddenly she turned back to the door, where Coburn stood.

"You know Dr. Coburn, Jack! I brought him along, too—I was in such a hurry to see you all. Where's Helen?"

"Yes, I just butted in," Coburn said, laughing. "I wouldn't let her come without me. I wanted to shake on it, too!"

"But where's that sainted wife of yours?" Venetia persisted.

When Jackson told her of the boy's illness, she hurried upstairs without another word, leaving the two men standing in the library. At first, when they were alone, with the common memory of that last meeting in the doctor's rooms barely a week before, there was an awkward silence. Coburn had now an explanation for the architect's erratic behavior on that occasion, and he refrained from his usual blunt speech. And the architect, seeing through the mist of accumulated impressions, as in a long vista, that night after the fire when Coburn had found him half-crazed, a prey to horrible visions, could not speak. Yet that experience seemed removed from the present, as if it rose from distant years, and somehow belonged to another person. Although he had never liked Coburn in the old days, he felt a kind of sympathy in the doctor's bearing, and was grateful for it.

"You must have thought I was crazy the other night," the architect remarked apologetically at last. "I didn't know much what I was up to!"

"That's all right, man," Coburn interrupted warmly. "Don't think about it again. It was damn good luck my running across you, that's all. If I'd known, of course— Say! that took sand, what you did to-day. Wheeler told Venetia all about it, and she told me. It makes a man feel good to see some one who has got the nerve to stand up and take medicine, and not try everlastingly to sneak out of things! If more folks nowadays would do that, it would be better for us all. Don't you mind what the papers say. They have to fling mud,—that's their game!"

"Well, it doesn't make much difference now what they say except,—except for my wife," Jackson answered dully. "And that can't be helped."

"Oh, I guess it won't last long. And somehow women don't mind those things half as much as you'd think, at least the best ones don't. And from what Venetia says, yours is one of the best!"

"Yes! That doesn't make it any easier. But I haven't congratulated you!" he exclaimed, repressing the confession of his own pain. "She is a splendid woman, lots of spirit," he remarked awkwardly.

"I rather think so!" A pleased smile illuminated the doctor's grave face. "She's just about the best ever!"

"I hope you will be happy," Jackson continued conventionally.

"Well, we expect to—don't see why we shouldn't. I guess we know pretty much what's to be found on both sides, and won't make ourselves uncomfortable looking for what ain't there."

Venetia came down the stairs very quietly, her exuberance all gone, and as she entered the room she was still wiping away the traces of tears.

"Poor little Powers!" she exclaimed. "Oh, Jack! I am terribly sorry."

"What's the matter?" Coburn demanded.

"It's pneumonia, poor little man!"

Jackson's lip trembled beneath his mustache, as he murmured to himself:—

"Yes, I supposed it would be. It's as tough as it well could be, for her!"

"I know he'll come through,—he must!" Venetia exclaimed helplessly, and added in a burst of admiration, "That trouble couldn't happen to Helen—it just couldn't! She's so splendid, Jack! It's a big thing to know there are such women about. She's holding him up there now, with a smile on her face!"

Jackson turned away from her eager eyes.

Again and again during the days that followed, while they worked for the child's life, and when all was done watched and waited together for what might come, that miserable foreboding of the first day came back to the man. An evil fate seemed close on his heels, ready to lay hand on him here or there. The illness of the child related itself in some unseen manner with the great catastrophe of his life. The old idea of retribution, that barbaric conception of blood sacrifice, tormented him, as it torments the most sceptical in the hour of crisis. It appeared to him that for his cowardice of nature, for all his weak and evil deeds, for the unknown dead in whose death he had connived, he was about to be called to pay with the life of his own child. And the mother, guiltless, in the inscrutable cruelty of fate, must pay with him and pay the larger share of the price of his evil, of his nature!

But during these days of dread the woman went her way calmly, serenely, prepared, outwardly at least, for any event. What the child's death would mean to her was known only to herself, for she consumed her grief patiently in the silence of the watch. The house grew more sombre, as day by day the struggle for life moved on to its crisis. Little Powers, like his mother, made his fight with unchildish patience. He had always been the quieter, less demonstrative one of the two boys, possessing a singular power of silence and abstraction, which had been attributed to physical weakness. Yet under the stress of disease he showed an unexpected resistance and vitality. The father, when he saw him lying in the great bed, with pathetic moments of playfulness even in the height of his fever, could not stay by his side....

The suspense of the child's illness mercifully threw all outer happenings into shade. Jackson was able to keep the newspapers away from Helen, and she asked no questions. His testimony at the inquest had revived to some extent the waning public interest in the Glenmore fire. Especially the Buzzard, which had assumed to itself all the credit for airing the conditions in the building department, made merry over Hart's replies to the coroner. It printed full-page cuts of scenes at the inquest that last day, when the architect was on the stand,—dramatic sketches of "tilts between the coroner and Hart," "Hart's insolent retorts," etc.; and it denounced editorially, with its peculiar unction of self-esteem, the "systematic corruption of the nation by such men as Graves, Hart, and their allies." But the Thunderer and the more respectable papers refrained from all such bitter insinuations. For some reason they forbore to pillory the only man who had voluntarily come forward and told all that he knew. Perhaps they respected the courage of the act; perhaps they were aware that their patrons had tired of "the Glenmore tragedy"; perhaps they felt that the real guilt lay too deep to be reached by their editorial darts. However that might be, the matter rested now with the district attorney and the Grand Jury.

For the inquest had been concluded and the coroner's report was published. It covered lengthily all the points touched upon by the many witnesses, and it contained much "scoring" of the city authorities. The contractor, Graves, the inspectors, Murphy and Lagrange, Gotz, the president of the defunct corporation, and Hart, were held to the Grand Jury for complicity in the death of the seventeen persons who had perished in the Glenmore fire....

Meanwhile the worst hour of anxiety for the child's life came, and Helen knelt by the bed holding the little body in her arms, devouring his face with her shining eyes. The hour passed, the child lived, there was hope of his recovery. Yet for a period they went to and fro softly, with that peculiar hush of fear scarcely relieved, lest their hopes might be too strong.

At last, however, Jackson was obliged to tell Helen what had happened at the inquest. She listened as to a message from a far land, her face blanched and set from the hours of fear through which she had passed. When he said that he, with the others, had been held to the Grand Jury, she merely asked:—

"When will that be?"

"Very soon, less than a fortnight, Everett says. He called here yesterday. He advised me to leave the city,—he came to see about that."

"What will they do?" she asked, not heeding the last remark.

"If they find a true bill, it will go to the trial jury. And," he added slowly, "the charge will be manslaughter."

She started as he pronounced the word. In her ears it was the legal synonym for murder, and before the awfulness of that conception her heart recoiled.

"Manslaughter!" she repeated involuntarily.

"Yes, but Everett thinks it is very doubtful whether the Grand Jury will find a true bill against any one. It would be almost an unheard-of thing to do. Of course, Graves will stay away until he sees how it will turn out, and probably the others will keep out of reach. Everett wants me to go—"

"No, no!" she cried, "never! You have come all this way on the hard road, and we must go on to the very end, no matter what that is."

"So I thought you would feel," he answered gently. "I said the same thing to Everett. Of course, the justice of it isn't very clear. It's mixed up with politics, anyway. I don't know that it would do much good to any one to stay and be tried. But if you feel that way—"

She laid her hand on his arm, imploring him mutely not to give her all the responsibility for the decision.

"Think what it might mean, if—if they found me guilty!" he muttered gloomily.

"I know," she shuddered. "But Francis, we must pay somehow, you and I. We must pay!"

But if in her heroic soul she was ready to pay, and to make him pay, at the price of public shame for her and her children, the full penalty of his misdeeds, it was not to be so. He was to escape the full measure of retribution, shielded by the accident of his class. Unknown to him, the tangled threads of his fate were being sorted in the great city, and the vengeance of society was being averted, so far, at least, as legal punishment was concerned. Everett Wheeler, once recovered from his disgust at the sentimental folly of the architect's confession at the inquest, had no mind to see his cousin on trial for manslaughter. His mood was invariably to settle things, to cover them up, to bury them! As has been said, he had political influence, enough to reach even to the district attorney's office, enough to close the mouth of the Chicago Buzzard, to quiet the snarls of the Thunderer. So the case against the men held to the Grand Jury for the hotel disaster was quietly dropped. The mayor put another man in Bloom's place as chief building inspector, and very soon things went merrily on in their old way. And that was the end of it all! The seventeen human beings who had lost their lives in the fire had not even pointed a moral by their agonizing death. For a few summer months the gaunt, smoke-blackened pit of ruins on the boulevard served to remind the passers-by of a grewsome tale. Then, by the beginning of the new year, in its place rose a splendid apartment building, faced with cut stone and trimmed with marble.

Wheeler notified the architect in a curt note that the case had been dismissed, and Jackson showed the letter to his wife.

"Thank God!" he exclaimed fervently, "that is the end. I shan't drag you into the mud any farther."

Helen looked up from the lawyer's letter with a troubled face. She had hardened herself to the coming trial, which she had fully expected. Now that it had been spared, all was not yet right to her scrupulous perception. A terrible wrong had been committed, a wrong to the poor souls who had lost their lives, a wrong, too, to the city and to society, making an evil pool of corruption. And in some mysterious way this had been covered up, hidden, and all was to go on as before! She had a primitive idea that all evil necessitated exact payment, and as long as this payment was deferred, so long was the day of light, of health, put off.

But the man, realizing more clearly than she the indirect penalties which his situation inevitably imposed, gave no further thought to the abstract question of justice. The outlook was bad enough as it was. He saw nothing before him in this city where he naturally belonged.

"What would you think of our moving to St. Louis?" he asked, a few days after he had received the lawyer's letter. "There is some sort of an opening there for me. Of course I had rather be in New York, but it is out of the question. It would take too long to get started. Or we might try Denver. I have done some work there, and it's a growing place."

"Do you think that we must leave Chicago?" she asked.

"Why!" he exclaimed, surprised that she should consider for a moment the possibility of their remaining where he had made such a failure of his life. "Do you want to stay here and be dropped by every soul you have known?"

"I don't care very much for that!"

"Well, there's nothing here for me. Stewart will take the office. He let me know mighty quick that we had better part! I am a dead dog in Chicago. Only yesterday I got a letter from the Kicker Brothers turning me down after telling me last month to go ahead. They pay for the work done so far, and that is all. You see it is out of the question to stay here!"

He spoke gloomily, as if in spite of all that had happened he had some grounds for feeling a little sore.

"But I don't mean to let this down me, not yet," he continued more buoyantly. "I owe it to you, at least, to make good. And I can do it somewhere else, where the sight of this mess isn't always in my eyes! It'll only be a matter of a few years, Nell."

Already the bitterness of the crisis was passing away, and he was beginning to plan for the future, for a career, for success,—built on a surer foundation, but nevertheless success and repute in the world. His wife realized it and understood. She was standing by his side, as he sat with his elbows resting on his knees, studying the faded figure in the carpet. She put her hands on his head and drew it toward her, protectingly, pityingly, as she would the bruised head of a child.

"So you think you must begin somewhere else?" she said gently, sitting down by his side.

"It's the only thing to do. The question is where!"

She made no reply and seemed buried in her thoughts.

"By the way," he remarked, "whom do you think I saw on the street to-day? Wright. He was staring at Letterson's new store,—you know Frank Peyton did it. The old man stopped me and seemed really glad to see me. I suppose he knows everything, too," he added musingly.

The incident comforted him greatly. He had seen Wright in the crowded street, and had looked away from him, meaning to hurry past, but the older man had stretched out his long arm and good-naturedly drawn Hart to one side out of the press of the street.

"How are you, Hart?" he had said cordially, with his boyish smile. "What do you think of this thing? Bold, isn't it? That Peyton's got nerve to put up this spiderweb right here in State Street. Now, I couldn't do that! But I guess he's on the right track. That's what we are coming to. What do you think?"

They had walked down the street together, and Wright had continued to talk of Peyton and the other young architects in the city, and of their work.

"I tell you, those youngsters have got the future. They have the courage to try experiments. That won't do for an old fellow like me. My clients would kick, too, if I took to anything new. But I like to see the young ones try it.... What are you doing?" he had asked abruptly. "Come in to see me, won't you? I shall be here two or three weeks. Be sure to come in, now!"

They had shaken hands, and the older architect had looked searchingly into Hart's face, his boyish smile changing subtly into an expression of concern and sweetness, as if there was something on the tip of his tongue which he refrained from saying there in the crowded street. The memory of the little meeting came back to the man now, and he felt more grateful for Wright's cordiality than he had at the time.

"Wright asked me to come in and see him. I think I will do it some day," he remarked presently.

"Why not give up the idea of starting your own office?" Helen asked suddenly, her thoughts having come to a definite point.

"What do you mean? Try something else? It would be pretty risky," he answered doubtfully, surprised that she should want him to abandon his profession, to admit defeat.

"I didn't mean that, exactly. It wouldn't do at all for you to give up architecture. That never entered my mind. Only—listen!"

She slipped from the lounge where she had been sitting and knelt beside him, taking the lapels of his coat in her hands, her face aglow with a sudden enthusiasm.

"I've been thinking of so many things these last months, and lately, while Powers has been so sick, I've thought of everything since we were in Italy together, since I loved you,—all those talks we had, and the plans we made, the work you did, the sketches—those first ones." She paused, trying to put her tumultuous thoughts in order.

"I grow so slowly! I was so ignorant of everything, of myself and you in those days. It has taken me a long time, dear, to understand, to grow up!" she exclaimed, her lips trembling in a little smile.

"We stumbled almost at the start, you and I. You started your office and worked hard, always striving to get ahead, to get us comforts and position, and not because you liked the things you were doing. You took anything that promised to bring in money. And it got worse and worse, the more we had. It used to trouble me then, 'way back, but I didn't know what was the matter with it all. We lived out there with all those rich people around us. And those we knew that weren't very rich were all trying to get richer, to have the same things the others had. We did what they did, and thought what they thought, and tried to live as they did. It wasn't honest!"

"What do you mean by that?" he asked blankly.

"I'll say it clearly; just give me time, dear! It is true, but it is made up of so many little, unimportant trifles. You worked just to get money, and we spent it all on ourselves, or pretty nearly all. And the more we had, the more we seemed to need. No man ought to work that way! It ruins him in the end. That's why there are so many common, brutal men and women everywhere. They work for the pay, and for nothing else."

"Oh, not always."

"Most of those we knew did," she replied confidently.

"Well, it's the law of life," he protested with a touch of his old superiority in his tone.

"No, it isn't, it isn't!" she exclaimed vehemently. "Never! There are other laws. Work is good in itself, not just for the pay, and we must live so that the pay makes less difference, so that we haven't to think of the pay!"

"I don't see what this has to do with our going to St. Louis!" he interjected impatiently, disinclined for a theoretic discussion of the aims of life, when the question of bread and butter was immediately pressing.

"But it has, Francis, dear. It has! If you go there, you will try to live the old way. You will try to get ahead, to struggle up in the world, as it is called, and that is the root of all the trouble! That is what I have come to see all these months. We are all trying to get out of the ranks, to leave the common work to be done by others, to be leaders. We think it a disgrace to stay in the ranks, to work for the work's sake, to bear the common lot, which is to live humbly and labor! Don't let us struggle that way any longer, dear. It is wrong,—it is a curse. It will never give us happiness—never!"

He began to see the drift of her purpose, and resented it with all the prejudice of his training,—resented, at least, the application of it to him.

"The ranks are crowded enough as it is! I don't see the call for a man to put himself into them if he has the ability to do any better, I must say!"

"Not if—not after all that has happened?" she asked mournfully.

"Oh! that's it. You think that it's only I who should go down, meekly give up all ambition, because I can't be trusted? You are afraid that I will go wrong?" he retorted bitterly.

"No, not that quite! Yet—" she hesitated, aware that the new love between them hung in the balance. Then she went on courageously: "No, I have no fear of that. You couldn't! But the temptation to make money will be before you every moment, and to-day few men can resist that. It is better to be in the ranks than to struggle to lead, and then lead falsely, trying for false things,—false things!"

"That is what you think of me!" he repeated mournfully.

In spite of all the experience which had come to him the last weeks, all that he had confessed to himself and to his wife, it was bitter to realize that she refused him now that absolute faith and blind confidence in his guidance which had made courtship and the first years of marriage such a pleasant tribute to his egotism. He had come back to her repentant; he had said, "I have erred. I repent. Will you forgive me and love me?" And she had taken him to herself again with a deeper acceptance than at first. Yet when it came to the point of action, she seemed to be withdrawing her forgiveness, to be judging and condemning him.

In this he wronged her. What she was trying hesitantly and imperfectly to say to him was not merely the lesson of his catastrophe, but the fruited thought of her life,—what had come to her through her imperfect, groping education, through the division of their marriage, through her children, through the empty dinner parties in the society he had sought, through the vacancy in her heart,—yes! through the love that she had for him. While she was silent, clinging to him, baffled, he spoke again:—

"Don't you see that I want to retrieve myself, and make some amends to you for all that I have made you suffer? You would kill every ambition in me, even the one to work for you and the boys!"

"That would not make me happy, not if you made as great a fortune as uncle Powers! Not that way!"

"What would, then?"

"Do you remember some of those first things you did? The little country club at Oak Hills? I was awfully happy when you showed me that," she said softly, irrelevantly. "Somehow I know you could do that again and better things, too, if—if you could forget the money and all that. Real, honest work! You could be the artist I know you are, the maker of honest, fine buildings!"

In the enthusiasm of her face he read dimly once more the long-past dream of his youth, the talk of young men in the studios, the hours by her side on the steamer, when they had come together in the imperfect attraction of sex. It was but the flicker of a distant light, however; he had learned the lesson of the city too well.

"That sounds very well. But it isn't practical. If you want to do big work, you have to be your own master, and not work for some one else! And art, especially architecture, lives on the luxury of the rich, whom you seem to despise!"

"What does it matter whose name goes on the plans? It's the work that makes it that counts, and no one can have that but the one who does it."

"Now, you're talking poetry, Nell, not sense!" he exclaimed good-naturedly, getting up from the lounge and walking to and fro. "This world doesn't run on those lines, and you and I aren't going to make it over, either. You're talking like a romantic girl!"

"There isn't much else of the girl left in me!" she smiled wistfully back to him.

"Just look at it practically. If I go out of business for myself, I couldn't earn more than two hundred a month working for some firm. That's as much as Wright ever pays his best men. What would that be to live on? For you and me and the boys?"

"We could make it do. There are many others who have less."

"Next you will want to take in washing."

"I had rather do the cooking, when it comes to that," she flashed back.

"I can see us in a four-room flat somewhere south on one of those God-forsaken prairie streets. One slovenly maid, and the food! A cigar on Sundays and holidays! You would buy your clothes over the counter at Letterson's and go bargain-hunting for your weekly amusement. No, thank you! I am not quite so far gone yet as that, my dear. You don't realize the facts."

His mind was not open to her conception, even in its simplest application. To him a small income with its manner of life meant merely degradation. She saw, as never before, how Chicago had moulded him and had left his nature set in a hard crust of prejudice. The great industrial city where he had learned the lesson of life throttled the finer aspirations of men like a remorseless giant, converting its youth into iron-clawed beasts of prey, answering to the one hoarse cry, "Success, Success, Success!"

"And how should we educate the boys? Think of it! How could we give them as good a start in life as we had? Why, it would be criminal to them. It's nonsense!"

"I have thought of them," she replied calmly. "And I am willing to take the risks for them, too. I am willing to see them start in life poor, with just what we could do for them. Perhaps in the world to which they will grow up, things will be different, anyway."

He had tested her in the tenderest point, and she was stanch. He began to see how far this theory of living and working in the world went with her. She was ready to put herself outside her own class, and her children also, for the sake of an idea, a feeling that she had about man's true purpose in life.

"I must go to Powers, now," she said at last, a little sadly. Before she left the room she went up to him impulsively and leaned her head against his breast for a moment. "Perhaps in time you will come to feel more as I do. And, Francis, there's another reason why I should hate to have us leave this place. I don't want to think that you are running away from the disgrace, from the trouble which has happened here!" She raised her head proudly. "That is what all cheap people do, go to some place where they aren't known; as if it mattered to us now what people think or say! I want you to stay right here, where it happened, and make a new life here."

After she had left him, he continued to walk to and fro in his uncle's old library, between the heavy black-walnut bookcases, where it was permitted to him now to smoke as many cigarettes as he liked. The house had been left very much as it was during the old man's life. Now that Mrs. Amelia Hart was free to make those domestic changes which had been denied to her while the owner lived, she had never come to the necessary resolution. Powers Jackson's will was still effective with her, even in death.

The architect thought of the old man, wondering vaguely what he would have said to Helen's argument. He was not so sure as formerly that he understood the rough old fellow, who apparently had grasped the main chance and wrung it dry. His uncle's purpose in endowing that school struck him suddenly as complex, and also his treatment of himself. Possibly he, too,—the successful man of his day,—having exploited the world for forty years, had come to the belief that ambition in the ordinary sense of the word was futile....

The architect had not thought to sneak away from the place where he had gone to failure when he suggested to his wife starting life once more in a new city. It had seemed merely ordinary good judgment to go where he should not be hampered by a clouded past. And he resented his wife's feeling that he should remain and do a kind of penance for the sins that he had confessed, repented, and repaired so far as he was able. She asked too much of him! He had given up all the money he had, and was ready to begin the struggle for bread with a fairer view of his duties. But it seemed that that was not enough for her: she demanded now that he sacrifice his ambition, that he return to the ranks, as a draughtsman, a clerk, a hireling!

Nevertheless, her words worked unconsciously in him, for hers was the stronger nature. He had lived his own way and had failed, rather miserably. What she wanted must, perforce, guide him increasingly and determine his life. Presently he went upstairs to the child's room. There in the darkened chamber Helen was kneeling beside the bed holding little Powers in her strong arms. The child was asleep, his thin arms stretched above his head along the pillow. In the large bed the little figure, white and wasted with the lingering fever of his disease, lay peacefully. Helen turned her face to her husband as he entered, and he could see the smile that belied the tears in her eyes. And as he stood there in the silent room watching the two, the calm of elemental feeling stole over him. The woman and the child! These were the ancient, unalterable factors of human life; outside of them the multitudinous desires of men were shifting, trivial, little. For the first time in his life an indifference to all else in the world swept over him in gratitude for these two gifts....

CHAPTER XXXIV

Dr. Coburn had at last found time for the episode of matrimony, so Venetia announced to Helen one afternoon. She had run in on her way to the city, and her eyes sparkled mischievously as she added:—

"It's just as well to have it over before Mrs. P. returns—it will save her so much embarrassment, you know. She won't have to strike an attitude. And it's lots easier this way, no fuss, no bother, and you have it all to yourself. Can you and Jack come 'round to-morrow afternoon about four? Dr. Knowles's Church—you know where it is. Don't be late." As she started for the door, she turned swiftly, threw her arms about the older woman, and kissed her vehemently.

"Do you know, puss, I think we are going to be awfully happy!" And then she darted out of the door.

They met Venetia and the doctor at the door of the church. Coburn, who had on a new brown business suit that betrayed its origin by its numerous creases, grinned very broadly as he raised his hat to Helen.

"Come here, Pete," Venetia called busily to the old terrier, who hobbled after her. "Pete had to come to see us married," she explained, as she tied him to the iron fence near the entrance. "But I don't suppose Dr. Knowles would like to have him come in and sit in the corner of a pew. I'm sure he'd behave very well, though! Uncle Harry couldn't come, poor dear; he's over in Carlsbad taking the cure,—but he wrote such a nice letter to my man. We didn't ask anybody else. Well, are we all ready?"

"Just about!" the doctor answered briskly. "Fine day for a wedding, isn't it?"

"Don't whimper, Pete," Venetia said for a last warning, turning to the dog, and patting him once more. "Your missy won't be gone long, and when she comes back, you'll have cream for your supper and fruit-cake, too."

Then the four walked up the long aisle of the great bare church, and presently Dr. Knowles came from the vestry and performed the ceremony. Venetia stood very still and straight, drawing in her breath in little gasps, looking very hard at the broad face of the minister. Coburn, too, stood very straight, but Helen, who watched the two lovingly while the words of the contract rolled forth in the empty church, saw the look of tenderness in the man's face as his glance rested steadfastly on the woman by his side.

In a few minutes they were out again in the sunlight. Pete was surrounded by a group of small boys, who were debating whether he would bite if they got near enough to him.

"Here, boys," Venetia called, as she untied Pete's leash. "This is the day you must celebrate! Give me some money, Sayre."

And she distributed to the delighted urchins all the silver that the doctor had in his pockets. Then the four went to a restaurant in the city, where they had dinner together, Jackson ordering the champagne, and they talked until Helen rose and declared it was time to leave the bride and bridegroom. The doctor and Venetia walked off westward to their new home, arm in arm, Pete dangling in the rear from his leash, which his mistress held.

"What good times they will have!" Helen exclaimed, watching them bob across the gayly lighted thoroughfare, dragging the terrier after them. "I suppose it's because they're both what Venetia would call 'real clear sports.'"

After the newly married couple had disappeared, the Harts walked leisurely northwards, and as the night was calm and warm, they kept on beyond Ohio Street, strolling along the shore of the lake towards the Park. The great houses across the boulevard were already deserted by their occupants, who had begun the annual migration. The architect's eye roved over the gloomy faÇades of these monstrous piles of brick and stone, to which the toilsome steps of some successful ones in the city had led; and he began to wonder, as he had when a boy, why in this world, which seemed to hold so many pleasant things, the owners of these ugly houses could be content to live in them. To the boy's mind the ambition to encase one's self in a great dwelling had seemed so inadequate! Again, to-night, he looked at their burly shadows, and speculated over them without envy.

They loitered arm in arm beside the sea-wall, listening to the heaving lake, the cool splash of water on the concrete embankment below the walk.

"Nell, I saw Wright to-day," he remarked thoughtfully, "and had a long talk with him."

She turned her head and waited.

"He's a good deal more of a man than I used to think him!" he went on slowly. "There were a lot of people waiting to see him, and he had to go somewhere, but he didn't seem to mind that I was there with him a long time. I guess he knows pretty nearly all that has happened to me."

Wright had said nothing about the Glenmore or Graves, however, and Jackson had not gone into his story very far. But the older man had heard, it is true, something here and there, from this man and that, over the lunch table at his club, from one or two men in his office. And he had imagination enough to picture the whole story.

"I told him I was thinking of going somewhere else," Jackson continued slowly.

"What did he say?"

"Oh, a good many things,—he's a pretty human fellow,—looks at many sides of a matter. Well, in the end he offered me a place with him! Not the old thing,—he's got some new men in, and can't put any one ahead of them. I guess he would have to make a place!"

She leaned forward, repressing the question that rose swiftly to her lips. But after a few moments, Jackson answered it slowly.

"I told him that I would like to think it over for a day or two."

She refrained still from questioning him, and they strolled on slowly into the park. There on the benches facing the lake sat many couples, crowded close together, resting after the warm day's work. Along the stone embankment outside the glare of the arc lights the lake heaved in an oily calm without a ripple, and from the dark surface of the water rose a current of cold air. The architect and his wife turned back instinctively into the empty darkness of the boulevard.

"It's pretty good of the old boy to be willing to take back a man who's been on his knees," Jackson mused, breaking the long silence in which they had walked.

"Don't!" she murmured. "That hurts—don't think that!"

"Suppose we try it, Nell," he said quickly. "I know you would like to have me—and perhaps it is best."

"But you mustn't do it just for my sake!"

"I think you are rather fussy!" he retorted. "Why else should I do it, my dear, dear wife?"

"But you might regret it, then! You must be sure,—not do it just to please me, but because you see things as I do, and know that it's the only way for us to live and have peace."

Doubtless she asked too much of the man she loved, for most beings—instinctive creatures—act from a philosophy of purely personal influences. Jackson Hart, certainly, would never have considered relinquishing his ambition to thrust himself forward, to have a career in this world, out of any intellectual convictions. Nor could it be said that his wife's half-formulated arguments had persuaded him. But she herself had convinced him, the strong, self-contained womanhood in her, her undaunted spirit, with which he lived daily, and which perforce colored his soul. Especially, these latter weeks of suspense and despair, while their child's life was in the balance, she had made him hers. If it were a victory for the woman, it was an emotional victory, which she had won over her husband,—and such victories are the only ones that endure in these matters. He felt her spirit as he had never felt anything else, and realized at last dimly that in all the big questions of life she was right. Beautiful, loving, strong, and fearless, she was his! And what was his "career" against her heart and soul?

"Perhaps you will regret it," he remarked half playfully, "and will want me to change later and do better by you and the children."

"Never, never!" She drew his arm closer to her breast, as if symbolically to show him her absolute content with what she had.

"Well, those fellows will grin when I walk into that office after my little splurge!" He swept his left arm through the air in an arc to describe the upward and downward course of a rocket "Into the ranks, at last!"

"To work, and live, and love, a little while," she added softly.

"It isn't exactly the way uncle Powers solved the problem!" he remarked teasingly. "I suppose you would have had him stay milking cows on that Vermont farm?"

"I didn't marry him!" she retorted swiftly. "And perhaps if he had it to do again, he would stay to milk the cows."

"You think so!" he exclaimed sceptically.

For her, at least, there was neither doubt nor hesitation. She answered surely the inarticulate call of the larger world, the call of the multitudes that labor and die without privilege, to share with them the common lot of life.

CHAPTER XXXV

That small fragment of Chicago society which had known the Jackson Harts, and interested itself in their doings, was mildly stirred over the news that the brilliant and promising young architect had been obliged to close his office, and had gone to work for his old employer. Indeed, for some weeks the Harts furnished the Forest Park dinner-tables with a fresh topic of conversation that took the place of the strikes and poor Anthony Crawford's scattered fortune. It contained quite as much food for marvel and moral reflection as either of the others.

More information about the architect's troubles than that provided by the press had got abroad in Forest Park and the Shoreham Club. It was well known, for instance, that Hart had been obliged to dissolve his partnership with Freddie Stewart, owing to grave business irregularities, which extended beyond his connection with the recent disaster. It was generally agreed that his offences must have been very grave indeed to necessitate, at his age, with his influential connection, such a radical change of caste as had happened. Men commonly expressed their contempt because at a crisis he had shown such a deplorable "lack of nerve." They said, and among them were some of the architect's more intimate friends, that nothing he had done could justify this tame submission. "Why!" Mrs. Phillips exclaimed when she heard of it, "we've seen men live down things ten times worse. There was Peter Sewall, and old Preston, and the banker Potts, and a dozen more. They are as good as any of us to-day! And he needn't have told everything he knew, anyhow, to that old coroner." The measure of a man's guilt, in her eyes and those of many others, was what he was willing to admit to the world. "But it's that wife of his!" the widow continued bitterly. "She never had any spirit; she was cut out for a clerk's wife. I have always felt that she was responsible for Venetia's trouble. Well, she's got to her level at last!"

Finally, this portion of the great public held that under the circumstances the architect had shown singularly little judgment in staying on in the city: there was no "future" for him, under the circumstances, in Chicago. If he felt himself unable to hold his own against scandal, they argued, he should have the wit to leave the city where he had gone wrong and seek his fortune under new skies, where the faces of his successful friends would not remind him constantly of ignoble defeat.

Not that Jackson Hart had many opportunities of encountering his successful friends in the great city of Chicago. He had resigned from his club, and the Harts had moved very far away from the pleasant suburbs along the lake which were filled with their old acquaintances. They had gone to live in one of those flimsy flat-buildings in the southern part of the city, concerning which the architect had speculated the night the Glenmore was burned. It was near the street-car line, for the matter of a nickel fare was now of importance in their domestic economy. Occasionally, some one of the Forest Park ladies would report on her return from the city that she had run across Mrs. Hart at Steele's, "looking old and queerer than ever, dressed in the old things she wore out here, as if she didn't care whether school kept or not, poor thing!" But in the murky light of Steele's great shop, they could not have seen the serene, almost radiant beauty of the woman's face, the beauty of a soul content with its vision of the world, in harmony with itself.

And Jackson, "reduced to the ranks" by a few grades, in that career of his, which he dubbed good-humoredly "From shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves, in three acts," was developing certain patient virtues of inestimable charm in the domestic circles of plain life, though not essential for brilliant success. In his box of an office next Wright's large draughting-room, he worked almost side by side with his former draughtsman Cook, who had also come back to the old firm. For some months they hardly spoke to each other; indeed, the men in Wright's generally held aloof from Hart. But they have accepted him at last. Cook has begun, even, to regain some of his old admiration for his chief, comprehending, perhaps, that in the office by his side there is slowly working out a career of real spiritual significance, if of little outward display.

As to Wright, who knows more of the man's real story than the others, he treats his old employee with a fine consideration and respect, realizing that this man is doing handsomely a thing that few men have the character to do at all. His admiration for Hart's work has grown, also, and he frankly admits that the younger man has a better talent for architecture than he himself ever possessed, as well as great cleverness and ingenuity, so necessary in an art which is intimately allied with mechanics. For it is true that after sluggish years there has revived within Hart the creative impulse, that spirit of the artist, inherent to some extent in all men, which makes the work of their hands an engrossing joy. The plans of a group of buildings, which the firm have undertaken for a university in a far Western state, have been entrusted very largely to Hart. As they grow from month to month in the voluminous sheets of drawings, they are becoming the pride of the office. And Wright generously allots the praise for their beauty where it largely belongs.

Thus the social waters of the fast-living city are rapidly rolling over the Jackson Harts. In all probability they will never again in this life come to the surface, and call for comment; for the architect and his wife have already sunk into the insignificance of the common lot, so much praised by the poets, so much despised by our good Americans of the "strenuous" school. They have had their opportunities to better themselves in the worldly scale, but there has never been any question between husband and wife of a change in their social or material condition. They even contemplate with equanimity leaving their children in the universal struggle no better equipped than with the possession of health and a modest education,—there to meet their fate as their parents have done before them.

Almost the last public appearance of the Jackson Harts in that portion of the Chicago world which had formerly known them occurred at the elaborate dedicatory exercises of the JACKSON INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE. When the handsomely engraved invitation came to them, the architect was disinclined to attend; but Helen, who thought only of the old man's probable wish in the matter, induced her husband to take her. The exercises were held in the pretty little auditorium which occupied one wing of the large school building. There was much ceremony, and numerous speeches, besides the oration delivered by the director, Dr. Everest, on "Modern Industrialism," which was considered a masterpiece of its kind and was afterwards printed and circulated by the trustees. A bust of the founder, which fronted the stage, was first unveiled amid great applause. Dr. Everest in the introduction of his oration turned from time to time to apostrophize its rugged marble features, while he paid his tribute to the founder of the institution. What the old man—who had always avoided voluble people like the pest—would have thought of the liberal eulogy scattered on his head, and of the eloquent discourse that followed, on the future of education and the working-man, no one will ever know. The rough old face looking inscrutably down on the little, bald-headed figure of the director gave no sign.

During the lengthy oration the architect's thoughts went wandering far astray back into his past, so closely involved with this handsome building. But Helen listened attentively to the director's flowing periods, searching his phrases for an interpretation of his purposes in regard to the school. Dr. Everest, however, was far too wary an educator to commit himself to positive ideas. Yet in the maze of his discourse there might be gathered hints of his attitude toward the problem of industrial education. After the opening tribute to the founder, "whom we may call a typical leader of our triumphant industrial democracy," the speaker dwelt glowingly on the advanced position of our country among the nations of the earth, attributing its phenomenal progress to the nature of its political and educational institutions, which had developed and encouraged the energies of such men as Powers Jackson:—

"We lead the nations of the world in the arts of peace, owing to the energy and genius of men like our noble benefactor, owing, I may say, still more to the character of our institutions, political and educational, which produce such men as he was!" Then followed a flattering contrast between the "aristocratic and mediÆval education" of the English universities and the older American colleges, and the broad, liberal spirit of newer institutions, especially technical schools. The intention of the founder of the Jackson Industrial Institute, he said, was to broaden the democratic ideal, "to bring within the reach of every child in this greatest of industrial metropoli, not only the rudiments of an education, but the most advanced technical training, by means of which he may raise himself among his fellows and advance the illimitable creative ingenuity of our race. Here will come the boy whose father labors at the bottom of the industrial ladder, and if he be worthy, if he have the necessary talent and the industry, here in our workshops and laboratories he may fit himself to mount to the very top of that ladder, and become in turn a master and leader of men, like our great benefactor! And we may well believe that the sight of those benignant features will be an inspiration to the youth to strive even as he strove. That face will kindle the noble ambitions of the learner, who will remember that our good founder once labored with his own hands at the forge not far from this monument to his greatness, and that he rose by his own unaided industry and ability to command thousands of operatives, to control millions of capital, yes, to influence the wide industrial world!

"In America, thank God, the poor man may yet rise to a position of leadership, if he be worthy. And what the world needs to-day more than all else is leaders, leaders of men. May we not prophesy that the Jackson Industrial Institute will be a large factor, yes, the largest factor of this great city, in educating leaders, and thus assisting to put an end to that wasteful and distressing antagonism between capital and labor? By the means of the education here provided, young men may raise themselves from the ranks of common labor to the position and responsibilities of capital! Let us hope that this will be the happy result of an educational foundation provided by a great captain of industry, and placed here in the heart of the workshops of Chicago. Thus may we assist in preserving and fostering the spirit of our noble institutions by means of which man is given freedom to reap the fruits of his own labor and intelligence!" ...

And Dr. Everest continued on this plane of eloquence for another half-hour, until even Judge Phillips, who had listened with rapt attention, began to nod in his chair. At last, when the doctor sat down, stroking his thick black beard and wiping his shining brow, loud applause broke forth from all parts of the auditorium. The applause sounded much like the ironic laughter of the gods over the travesty of the old man's purpose, to which they had just listened.

To Helen, especially, it seemed that no more complete twisting of his idea in thus bestowing his wealth were possible! However, the great school stands there, in the neighborhood where his old operatives live,—stands there and will stand there for many years, mistaken or not in its aims as one looks at this world of ours; and some day, maybe, when Dr. Everest has grasped some new form of the educational main chance, it may fall into other hands and become more nearly what its founder meant it to be,—a source of help and inspiration to the common man, who must labor all his days at common tasks, and can look to no material advancement in this life.

After the exercises the rooms of the building were thrown open for inspection, and the guests strolled through the laboratories and workshops in little parties, discussing the oration and exclaiming over the magnificence of the appointments. The Harts wandered over the school with the rest, and the architect looked about him with a certain curiosity. As they returned to the main hall under the rotunda, he exclaimed, peering up into the dome, "Nell, I can't seem to remember this place: it looks queer and strange to me, as if somebody else had done the plans, and I had just looked over them!"

"Somebody else did do them," she answered, drawing him away from a group of people who had come out of one of the adjoining rooms.

In a little while they got their wraps and prepared to leave the institution, having a long journey before them to reach their home. As they crossed the entrance hall, they ran into Pemberton, who was alone. He bowed to Helen as though he meant to speak to her, and then catching sight of Jackson, who was behind her, he merely bent his head the fraction of an inch, and, stepping to one side, passed on. He could not, evidently, forgive a stain upon a man's honor, arrogating to himself, as so many of us do, the privileges of deity. The architect's face flushed at the slight, and he hurried his steps toward the vestibule. As they passed through the broad doorway, he said to his wife:—

"Well, Nell, I suppose I deserved it,—the old Turk!"

"No, you did not deserve it!" she replied swiftly. "But it makes no difference, dear!"

And, fortunately, there are few things that do make any great difference to real men and women,—and one of the least is the casual judgment of their fellow-men.