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this tragedy. He was interested in another woman--Aileen-- and so her foolish thoughts and
explanations, her fear, sorrow, distress, were not important to him. He could take her agonized
wish for his freedom as a comment on his probable guilt, a doubt of his innocence, a criticism of
him! She turned away for a minute, and he started to leave the room.
"I'll be back again in a few moments," he volunteered. "Are the children here?"
"Yes, they're up in the play-room," she answered, sadly, utterly nonplussed and distraught.
"Oh, Frank!" she had it on her lips to cry, but before she could utter it he had bustled down the
steps and was gone. She turned back to the table, her left hand to her mouth, her eyes in a
queer, hazy, melancholy mist. Could it be, she thought, that life could really come to this--that
love could so utterly, so thoroughly die? Ten years before--but, oh, why go back to that?
Obviously it could, and thoughts concerning that would not help now. Twice now in her life her
affairs had seemed to go to pieces--once when her first husband had died, and now when her
second had failed her, had fallen in love with another and was going to be sent off to prison.
What was it about her that caused such things? Was there anything wrong with her? What was
she going to do? Where go? She had no idea, of course, for how long a term of years he would
be sent away. It might be one year or it might be five years, as the papers had said. Good
heavens! The children could almost come to forget him in five years. She put her other hand to
her mouth, also, and then to her forehead, where there was a dull ache. She tried to think
further than this, but somehow, just now, there was no further thought. Suddenly quite outside
of her own volition, with no thought that she was going to do such a thing, her bosom began to
heave, her throat contracted in four or five short, sharp, aching spasms, her eyes burned, and
she shook in a vigorous, anguished, desperate, almost one might have said dry-eyed, cry, so
hot and few were the tears. She could not stop for the moment, just stood there and shook, and
then after a while a dull ache succeeded, and she was quite as she had been before.
"Why cry?" she suddenly asked herself, fiercely--for her. "Why break down in this stormy,
useless way? Would it help?"
But, in spite of her speculative, philosophic observations to herself, she still felt the echo, the
distant rumble, as it were, of the storm in her own soul. "Why cry? Why not cry?" She might
have said--but wouldn't, and in spite of herself and all her logic, she knew that this tempest
which had so recently raged over her was now merely circling around her soul's horizon and
would return to break again.
Chapter L
The arrival of Steger with the information that no move of any kind would be made by the sheriff
until Monday morning, when Cowperwood could present himself, eased matters. This gave him
time to think--to adjust home details at his leisure. He broke the news to his father and mother in
a consoling way and talked with his brothers and father about getting matters immediately
adjusted in connection with the smaller houses to which they were now shortly to be compelled
to move. There was much conferring among the different members of this collapsing
organization in regard to the minor details; and what with his conferences with Steger, his
seeing personally Davison, Leigh, Avery Stone, of Jay Cooke & Co., George Waterman (his old-
time employer Henry was dead), ex-State Treasurer Van Nostrand, who had gone out with the
last State administration, and others, he was very busy. Now that he was really going into
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