eat prosperity seemed to have bereft him, came back, and
these qualities, used in his own behalf, commended him as much to his
creditors as the anxiety he showed that no one should suffer by him;
this even made some of them doubtful of his sincerity. They gave him
time, and there would have been no trouble in his resuming on the old
basis, if the ground had not been cut from under him by the competition
of the West Virginia company. He saw himself that it was useless to
try to go on in the old way, and he preferred to go back and begin the
world anew where he had first begun it, in the hills at Lapham. He put
the house at Nankeen Square, with everything else he had, into the
payment of his debts, and Mrs. Lapham found it easier to leave it for
the old farmstead in Vermont than it would have been to go from that
home of many years to the new house on the water side of Beacon. This
thing and that is embittered to us, so that we may be willing to
relinquish it; the world, life itself, is embittered to most of us, so
that we are glad to have done with them at last; and this home was
haunted with such memories to each of those who abandoned it that to go
was less exile than escape. Mrs. Lapham could not look into Irene's
room without seeing the girl there before her glass, tearing the poor
little keep-sakes of her hapless fancy from their hiding-places to take
them and fling them in passionate renunciation upon her sister; she
could not come into the sitting-room, where her little ones had grown
up, without starting at the thought of her husband sitting so many
weary nights at his desk there, trying to fight his way back to hope
out of the ruin into which he was slipping. When she remembered that
night when Rogers came, she hated the place. Irene accepted her
release from the house eagerly, and was glad to go before and prepare
for the family at Lapham. Penelope was always ashamed of her
engagement there; it must seem better somewhere else and she was glad
to go too. No one but Lapham in fact, felt the pang of parting in all
its keenness. Whatever regret the others had was softened to them by
the likeness of their flitting to many of those removals for the summer
which they made in the late spring when they left Nankeen Square; they
were going directly into the country instead of to the seaside first;
but Lapham, who usually remained in town long after they had gone, knew
all the difference. For his nerves there was