fied." His voice dropped in his throat; he
swallowed once or twice, and then did not speak.

"Do you mean that it's all over with you?" she asked fearfully.

He bowed his big head, wrinkled and grizzled; and after awhile he said,
"It's hard to realise it; but I guess there ain't any doubt about it."
He drew a long breath, and then he explained to her about the West
Virginia people, and how he had got an extension of the first time they
had given him, and had got a man to go up to Lapham with him and look
at the works,--a man that had turned up in New York, and wanted to put
money in the business. His money would have enabled Lapham to close
with the West Virginians. "The devil was in it, right straight along,"
said Lapham. "All I had to do was to keep quiet about that other
company. It was Rogers and his property right over again. He liked
the look of things, and he wanted to go into the business, and he had
the money--plenty; it would have saved me with those West Virginia
folks. But I had to tell him how I stood. I had to tell him all about
it, and what I wanted to do. He began to back water in a minute, and
the next morning I saw that it was up with him. He's gone back to New
York. I've lost my last chance. Now all I've got to do is to save the
pieces."

"Will--will--everything go?" she asked.

"I can't tell, yet. But they shall have a chance at everything--every
dollar, every cent. I'm sorry for you, Persis--and the girls."

"Oh, don't talk of US!" She was trying to realise that the simple, rude
soul to which her heart clove in her youth, but which she had put to
such cruel proof, with her unsparing conscience and her unsparing
tongue, had been equal to its ordeals, and had come out unscathed and
unstained. He was able in his talk to make so little of them; he
hardly seemed to see what they were; he was apparently not proud of
them, and certainly not glad; if they were victories of any sort, he
bore them with the patience of defeat. His wife wished to praise him,
but she did not know how; so she offered him a little reproach, in
which alone she touched the cause of her behaviour at parting.
"Silas," she asked, after a long gaze at him, "why didn't you tell me
you had Jim Millon's girl there?"

"I didn't suppose you'd like it, Persis," he answered. "I did intend
to tell you at first, but then I put--I put it off. I thought you'd
come round some day, and find it out for yourself."

"I'm punish