g time
for nothing!" cried Rogers, in his disappointment. "Why are you so
particular? When you drove me out of the business you were not so very
particular."

Lapham winced. It was certainly ridiculous for man who had once so
selfishly consulted his own interests to be stickling now about the
rights of others.

"I guess nothing's going to happen overnight," he answered sullenly.
"Anyway, I shan't say what I shall do till morning."

"What time can I see you in the morning?"

"Half-past nine."

Rogers buttoned his coat, and went out of the room without another
word. Lapham followed him to close the street-door after him.

His wife called down to him from above as he approached the room again,
"Well?"

"I've told him I'd let him know in the morning."

"Want I should come down and talk with you?"

"No," answered Lapham, in the proud bitterness which his isolation
brought, "you couldn't do any good." He went in and shut the door, and
by and by his wife heard him begin walking up and down; and then the
rest of the night she lay awake and listened to him walking up and
down. But when the first light whitened the window, the words of the
Scripture came into her mind: "And there wrestled a man with him until
the breaking of the day.... And he said, Let me go, for the day
breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."

She could not ask him anything when they met, but he raised his dull
eyes after the first silence, and said, "I don't know what I'm going to
say to Rogers."

She could not speak; she did not know what to say, and she saw her
husband when she followed him with her eyes from the window, drag
heavily down toward the corner, where he was to take, the horse-car.

He arrived rather later than usual at his office, and he found his
letters already on his table. There was one, long and
official-looking, with a printed letter-heading on the outside, and
Lapham had no need to open it in order to know that it was the offer of
the Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad for his mills. But he went
mechanically through the verification of his prophetic fear, which was
also his sole hope, and then sat looking blankly at it.

Rogers came promptly at the appointed time, and Lapham handed him the
letter. He must have taken it all in at a glance, and seen the
impossibility of negotiating any further now, even with victims so
pliant and willing as those Englishmen.

"You've ruined me!" Rogers