it was the young West Virginian who had come on
to arrange the purchase of the Works, Irene had not yet seen any one,
and whether there was ever anything between them is a fact that would
need a separate inquiry. It is certain that at the end of five years
after the disappointment which she met so bravely, she was still
unmarried. But she was even then still very young, and her life at
Lapham had been varied by visits to the West. It had also been varied
by an invitation, made with the politest resolution by Mrs. Corey, to
visit in Boston, which the girl was equal to refusing in the same
spirit.

Sewell was intensely interested in the moral spectacle which Lapham
presented under his changed conditions. The Colonel, who was more the
Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay,
kept him and Mrs. Sewell over night at his house; and he showed the
minister minutely round the Works and drove him all over his farm. For
this expedition he employed a lively colt which had not yet come of
age, and an open buggy long past its prime, and was no more ashamed of
his turnout than of the finest he had ever driven on the Milldam. He
was rather shabby and slovenly in dress, and he had fallen unkempt,
after the country fashion, as to his hair and beard and boots. The
house was plain, and was furnished with the simpler moveables out of
the house in Nankeen Square. There were certainly all the necessaries,
but no luxuries unless the statues of Prayer and Faith might be so
considered. The Laphams now burned kerosene, of course, and they had
no furnace in the winter; these were the only hardships the Colonel
complained of; but he said that as soon as the company got to paying
dividends again,--he was evidently proud of the outlays that for the
present prevented this,--he should put in steam heat and naphtha-gas.
He spoke freely of his failure, and with a confidence that seemed
inspired by his former trust in Sewell, whom, indeed, he treated like
an intimate friend, rather than an acquaintance of two or three
meetings. He went back to his first connection with Rogers, and he put
before Sewell hypothetically his own conclusions in regard to the
matter.

"Sometimes," he said, "I get to thinking it all over, and it seems to
me I done wrong about Rogers in the first place; that the whole trouble
came from that. It was just like starting a row of bricks. I tried to
catch up and stop 'em from going, but they all