not send it, nor know anything about
it. It would raise the--well, it would--if the other bondholders knew
anything about it. But you can change that for your check, and nobody
the wiser."

"Oh, Rodney!" She was on his knee now. He was good, after all. Her head
was on his shoulder, and she was crying a little. "I've been so unhappy,
so unhappy, all day! And I can send that?" She sprang up. "I'll do it
this minute--I'll run and get my check-book!" But before she reached the
door she turned back, and came and stood by him and kissed him again and
again, and tumbled up his hair, and looked at him. There is, after all,
nothing in the world like a woman.

"Time enough in the morning," said Henderson, detaining her. "I want to
tell you all about it."

What he told her was, in fact, the case as it had been presented by his
lawyers, and it seemed a very large, a constitutional, kind of case. "Of
course," he said, "in the rivalry and competition of business
somebody must go to the wall, and in a great scheme of development and
reorganization of the transportation of a region as big as an empire
some individual interests will suffer. You can't help these changes. I'm
sorry for some of them--very sorry; but nothing would ever be done if
we waited to consider every little interest. And that the men who create
these great works, and organize these schemes for the benefit of the
whole public, shouldn't make anything by their superior enterprise and
courage is all nonsense. The world is not made that way."

The explanation, I am bound to say, was one that half the world
considers valid; it was one that squeezed through the courts. And when
it was done, and the whole thing had blown over, who cared? There were
some bondholders who said that it was rascally, that they had been
boldly swindled. In the clubs, long after, you would hear it said that
Hollowell and Henderson were awfully sharp, and hard to beat. It is a
very bad business, said the Brandon parliament, and it just shows that
the whole country is losing its moral sense, its capacity to judge what
is right and what is wrong.

I do not say that this explanation, the nature of which I have only
indicated, would have satisfied the clear mind of Margaret a year or two
before. But it was made by the man she loved, the man who had brought
her out into a world that was full of sunlight and prosperity and
satisfied desire; and more and more, day by day, she saw the world
through h