any remorse," said his father. "There's
nothing so useless, so depraving, as that. If you see you're wrong, it's
for your warning, not for your destruction."

Dan was not really feeling very remorseful; he had never felt that he
was much to blame; but he had an intellectual perception of the case,
and he thought that he ought to feel remorseful; it was this persuasion
that he took for an emotion. He continued to look very disconsolate.

"Come," said his father, touching his arm, "I don't want you to brood
upon these things. It can do no manner of good. I want you to go to
New York next week and look after that Lafflin process. If it's what he
thinks--if he can really cast his brass patterns without air-holes--it
will revolutionise our business. I want to get hold of him."

The Portuguese cook was standing in the basement door which they passed
at the back of the house. He saluted father and son with a glittering
smile.

"Hello, Joe!" said Dan.

"Ah, Joe!" said his father; he touched his hat to the cook, who snatched
his cap off.

"What a brick you are, father!" thought Dan. His heart leaped at the
notion of getting away from Ponkwasset; he perceived how it had been
irking him to stay. "If you think I could manage it with Lafflin--"

"Oh, I think you could. He's another slippery chap."

Dan laughed for pleasure and pain at his father's joke.

XLIX.

In New York Dan found that Lafflin had gone to Washington to look up
something in connection with his patent. In his eagerness to get away
from home, Dan had supposed that his father meant to make a holiday for
him, and he learned with a little surprise that he was quite in earnest
about getting hold of the invention he wrote home of Lafflin's absence;
and he got a telegram in reply ordering him to follow on to Washington.

The sun was shining warm on the asphalt when he stepped out of the
Pennsylvania Depot with his bag in his hand, and put it into the hansom
that drove up for him. The sky overhead was of an intense blue that made
him remember the Boston sky as pale and grey; when the hansom tilted
out into the Avenue he had a joyous glimpse of the White House; of
the Capitol swimming like a balloon in the cloudless air. A keen March
breeze swept the dust before him, and through its veil the classic
Treasury Building showed like one edifice standing perfect amid ruin
represented by the jag-tooth irregularities of the business architecture
along the wide s