was
first kindled. She knew how he had prided himself upon that; how he
had bragged of it to every listener, and had always lugged the fact in
as the last expression of his sense of success. "O Silas!"

"What's the use?" he retorted. "I saw it was coming a month ago.
There are some fellows out in West Virginia that have been running the
paint as hard as they could. They couldn't do much; they used to put
it on the market raw. But lately they got to baking it, and now
they've struck a vein of natural gas right by their works, and they pay
ten cents for fuel, where I pay a dollar, and they make as good a
paint. Anybody can see where it's going to end. Besides, the market's
over-stocked. It's glutted. There wa'n't anything to do but to shut
DOWN, and I've SHUT down."

"I don't know what's going to become of the hands in the middle of the
winter, this way," said Mrs. Lapham, laying hold of one definite
thought which she could grasp in the turmoil of ruin that whirled
before her eyes.

"I don't care what becomes of the hands," cried Lapham. "They've
shared my luck; now let 'em share the other thing. And if you're so
very sorry for the hands, I wish you'd keep a little of your pity for
ME. Don't you know what shutting down the Works means?"

"Yes, indeed I do, Silas," said his wife tenderly.

"Well, then!" He rose, leaving his supper untasted, and went into the
sitting-room, where she presently found him, with that everlasting
confusion of papers before him on the desk. That made her think of the
paper in her work-basket, and she decided not to make the careworn,
distracted man ask her for it, after all. She brought it to him.

He glanced blankly at it and then caught it from her, turning red and
looking foolish. "Where'd you get that?"

"You dropped it on the floor the other night, and I picked it up. Who
is 'Wm. M.'?"

"'Wm. M.'!" he repeated, looking confusedly at her, and then at the
paper. "Oh,--it's nothing." He tore the paper into small pieces, and
went and dropped them into the fire. When Mrs. Lapham came into the
room in the morning, before he was down, she found a scrap of the
paper, which must have fluttered to the hearth; and glancing at it she
saw that the words were "Mrs. M." She wondered what dealings with a
woman her husband could have, and she remembered the confusion he had
shown about the paper, and which she had thought was because she had
surprised one of his business secrets.