ecame
vivid, and her voice was slightly tremulous now, as she said, "But
what if he SHOULD be against you--although I don't believe he is, of
course--you told me he couldn't DO anything to you, Virgil."

"No," he said, slowly. "I can't see how he could do anything. It was
just a secret, not a patent; the thing ain't patentable. I've tried to
think what he could do--supposing he was to want to--but I can't figure
out anything at all that would be any harm to me. There isn't any way in
the world it could be made a question of law. Only thing he could do'd
be to TELL people his side of it, and set 'em against me. I been kind of
waiting for that to happen, all along."

She looked somewhat relieved. "So did I expect it," she said. "I was
dreading it most on Alice's account: it might have--well, young men are
so easily influenced and all. But so far as the business is concerned,
what if Mr. Lamb did talk? That wouldn't amount to much. It wouldn't
affect the business; not to hurt. And, besides, he isn't even doing
that."

"No; anyhow not yet, it seems." And Adams sighed again, wistfully. "But
I WOULD give a good deal to know what he thinks!"

Before his surrender he had always supposed that if he did such an
unthinkable thing as to seize upon the glue process for himself, what he
would feel must be an overpowering shame. But shame is the rarest thing
in the world: what he felt was this unremittent curiosity about his old
employer's thoughts. It was an obsession, yet he did not want to hear
what Lamb "thought" from Lamb himself, for Adams had a second obsession,
and this was his dread of meeting the old man face to face. Such an
encounter could happen only by chance and unexpectedly; since Adams
would have avoided any deliberate meeting, so long as his legs had
strength to carry him, even if Lamb came to the house to see him.

But people do meet unexpectedly; and when Adams had to be down-town he
kept away from the "wholesale district." One day he did see Lamb, as the
latter went by in his car, impassive, going home to lunch; and Adams,
in the crowd at a corner, knew that the old man had not seen him.
Nevertheless, in a street car, on the way back to his sheds, an hour
later, he was still subject to little shivering seizures of horror.

He worked unceasingly, seeming to keep at it even in his sleep, for he
always woke in the midst of a planning and estimating that must have
been going on in his mind before consciousness o