had
become nothing but a burden and disgrace to his family, stung on as if
by incessant repetition. He had crazy thoughts, impulses, fantasies, in
which he swiftly dreamed renunciation of escape. Then he knew that it
would not avail anything to remain; it would not avail anything even to
die; nothing could avail anything at once, but in the end, his going
would avail most. He must go; it would break the child's heart to face
his shame, and she must face it. He did not think of his eldest
daughter, except to think that the impending disaster could not affect
her so ruinously.

"My God, my God!" he groaned, as he went up stairs. Adeline called from
the room he had left, "Did you speak, father?"

He had a conscience, that mechanical conscience which becomes so active
in times of great moral obliquity, against telling a little lie, and
saying he had not spoken. He went on up stairs without answering
anything. He indulged the self pity, a little longer, of feeling himself
an old man forced from his home, and he had a blind reasonless
resentment of the behavior of the men who were driving him away, and
whose interests, even at that moment, he was mindful of. But he threw
off this mood when he entered his room, and settled himself to business.
There was a good deal to be done in the arrangement of papers for his
indefinite absence, and he used the same care in providing for some
minor contingencies in the company's affairs as in leaving instructions
to his children for their action until they should hear from him again.
Afterwards this curious scrupulosity became a matter of comment among
those privy to it; some held it another proof of the ingrained rascality
of the man, a trick to suggest lenient construction of his general
conduct in the management of the company's finances, others saw in it an
interesting example of the involuntary operation of business instincts
which persisted at a juncture when the man might be supposed to have
been actuated only by the most intensely selfish motives.

The question was not settled even in the final retrospect, when it
appeared that at the very moment that Northwick showed himself mindful
of the company's interests on those minor points, he was defrauding it
further in the line of his defalcations, and keeping back a large sum of
money that belonged to it. But at that moment Northwick did not consider
that this money necessarily belonged to the company, any more than his
daughters' h