ow what it
was you were at? Certainly you hadn't succeeded here in London--but
elsewhere you might or you might not--how could I tell? And moreover, I
don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown into something very
different from the boy Joel that left the shop--it must be twenty years
ago. I can only know about you and your affairs what you tell me."

"But my point is," pursued Thorpe, watching her face with a curiously
intent glance, "you never said to yourself: 'I KNOW he's going to
succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich man before he dies.'"

She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed fatigued
failure to comprehend why he was making so much of this purposeless
point.

"No--I don't remember ever having said that to myself," she admitted,
listlessly. Then a comment upon his words occurred to her, and she spoke
with more animation: "You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was
very important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were always talking
about getting rich; you kept the idea before you of sometime, at a
stroke, finding yourself a millionaire. That's been the idea of your
life. But what do I know about all that? My work has been to keep a roof
over my head--to keep the little business from disappearing altogether.
It's been hard enough, I can tell you, these last few years, with the
big jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small traders. I had the
invalid husband to support for between three and four years--a dead
weight on me every week--and then the children to look after, to clothe
and educate."

At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked at him. "Don't think
I'm ungrateful"--she went on, with a troubled effort at a smile--"but I
almost wish you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all. What
it means is that they've had two years at schools where now I shan't
be able to keep them any longer. They'll be spoiled for my kind of
life--and they won't have a fair chance for any other. I don't know what
will become of them."

The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not dull the gleam
in Thorpe's eyes. He even began a smile in the shadows of his unkempt
moustache.

"But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago, and over," he
persisted, doggedly--"and I told you there'd be more where that came
from, and that I stood to pull off the great event--even then, now, you
didn't believe in your innermost heart that I knew what I was talking
about, did you?"