monise, I
cannot say. She had much more of the harmonising to do, since they
were four to one; but then she had gone through so much greater trials
before. When the door of their carriage closed and it drove off with
her and her husband to the station, she fetched a long sigh.

"What is it?" asked Corey, who ought to have known better.

"Oh, nothing. I don't think I shall feel strange amongst the Mexicans
now."

He looked at her with a puzzled smile, which grew a little graver, and
then he put his arm round her and drew her closer to him. This made
her cry on his shoulder. "I only meant that I should have you all to
myself." There is no proof that she meant more, but it is certain that
our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities. The
price that we pay for civilisation is the fine yet impassable
differentiation of these. Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be
possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favour that
this is so. They may be right; and at any rate, the blank misgiving,
the recurring sense of disappointment to which the young people's
departure left the Coreys is to be considered. That was the end of
their son and brother for them; they felt that; and they were not mean
or unamiable people.

He remained three years away. Some changes took place in that time.
One of these was the purchase by the Kanawha Falls Company of the mines
and works at Lapham. The transfer relieved Lapham of the load of debt
which he was still labouring under, and gave him an interest in the
vaster enterprise of the younger men, which he had once vainly hoped to
grasp all in his own hand. He began to tell of this coincidence as
something very striking; and pushing on more actively the special
branch of the business left to him, he bragged, quite in his old way,
of its enormous extension. His son-in-law, he said, was pushing it in
Mexico and Central America: an idea that they had originally had in
common. Well, young blood was what was wanted in a thing of that kind.
Now, those fellows out in West Virginia: all young, and a perfect team!

For himself, he owned that he had made mistakes; he could see just
where the mistakes were--put his finger right on them. But one thing
he could say: he had been no man's enemy but his own; every dollar,
every cent had gone to pay his debts; he had come out with clean hands.
He said all this, and much more, to Mr. Sewell the summer after he sol