ter I've done him an injury."

"Now, now!" she said, trying to comfort him. "You couldn't do anybody an
injury to save your life, and everybody knows it."

"Well, anybody ought to know I wouldn't WANT to do an injury, but
this world isn't built so't we can do just what we want." He paused,
reflecting. "Of course there may be one explanation of why Walter's
still there: J. A. maybe hasn't noticed that he IS there. There's so
many I expect he hardly knows him by sight."

"Well, just do quit thinking about it," she urged him. "It only bothers
you without doing any good. Don't you know that?"

"Don't I, though!" he laughed, feebly. "I know it better'n anybody! How
funny that is: when you know thinking about a thing only pesters you
without helping anything at all, and yet you keep right on pestering
yourself with it!"

"But WHY?" she said. "What's the use when you know you haven't done
anything wrong, Virgil? You said yourself you were going to improve the
process so much it would be different from the old one, and you'd REALLY
have a right to it."

Adams had persuaded himself of this when he yielded; he had found it
necessary to persuade himself of it--though there was a part of him, of
course, that remained unpersuaded; and this discomfiting part of him was
what made his present trouble. "Yes, I know," he said. "That's true, but
I can't quite seem to get away from the fact that the principle of the
process is a good deal the same--well, it's more'n that; it's just about
the same as the one he hired Campbell and me to work out for him. Truth
is, nobody could tell the difference, and I don't know as there IS
any difference except in these improvements I'm making. Of course, the
improvements do give me pretty near a perfect right to it, as a person
might say; and that's one of the things I thought of putting in my
letter to him; but I was afraid he'd just think I was trying to make up
excuses, so I left it out. I kind of worried all the time I was writing
that letter, because if he thought I WAS just making up excuses, why, it
might set him just so much more against me."

Ever since Mrs. Adams had found that she was to have her way, the depths
of her eyes had been troubled by a continuous uneasiness; and, although
she knew it was there, and sometimes veiled it by keeping the revealing
eyes averted from her husband and children, she could not always cover
it under that assumption of absent-mindedness. The uneasy look b