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believe he had never committed, but to leave Philadelphia to seek a new world.
"If I get out of this safely," he said to himself, "this is the end. I am going West, and going into
some other line of business." He thought of street-railways, land speculation, some great
manufacturing project of some kind, even mining, on a legitimate basis.
"I have had my lesson," he said to himself, finally getting up and preparing to leave. "I am as
rich as I was, and only a little older. They caught me once, but they will not catch me again." He
talked to Wingate about following up the campaign on the lines in which he had started, and he
himself intended to follow it up with great energy; but all the while his mind was running with this
one rich thought: "I am a millionaire. I am a free man. I am only thirty-six, and my future is all
before me."
It was with this thought that he went to visit Aileen, and to plan for the future.
It was only three months later that a train, speeding through the mountains of Pennsylvania and
over the plains of Ohio and Indiana, bore to Chicago and the West the young financial aspirant
who, in spite of youth and wealth and a notable vigor of body, was a solemn, conservative
speculator as to what his future might be. The West, as he had carefully calculated before
leaving, held much. He had studied the receipts of the New York Clearing House recently and
the disposition of bank-balances and the shipment of gold, and had seen that vast quantities of
the latter metal were going to Chicago. He understood finance accurately. The meaning of gold
shipments was clear. Where money was going trade was--a thriving, developing life. He wished
to see clearly for himself what this world had to offer.
Two years later, following the meteoric appearance of a young speculator in Duluth, and after
Chicago had seen the tentative opening of a grain and commission company labeled Frank A.
Cowperwood & Co., which ostensibly dealt in the great wheat crops of the West, a quiet divorce
was granted Mrs. Frank A. Cowperwood in Philadelphia, because apparently she wished it.
Time had not seemingly dealt badly with her. Her financial affairs, once so bad, were now
apparently all straightened out, and she occupied in West Philadelphia, near one of her sisters,
a new and interesting home which was fitted with all the comforts of an excellent middle-class
residence. She was now quite religious once more. The two children, Frank and Lillian, were in
private schools, returning evenings to their mother. "Wash" Sims was once more the negro
general factotum. Frequent visitors on Sundays were Mr. and Mrs. Henry Worthington
Cowperwood, no longer distressed financially, but subdued and wearied, the wind completely
gone from their once much-favored sails. Cowperwood, senior, had sufficient money wherewith
to sustain himself, and that without slaving as a petty clerk, but his social joy in life was gone.
He was old, disappointed, sad. He could feel that with his quondam honor and financial glory,
he was the same--and he was not. His courage and his dreams were gone, and he awaited
death.
Here, too, came Anna Adelaide Cowperwood on occasion, a clerk in the city water office, who
speculated much as to the strange vicissitudes of life. She had great interest in her brother, who
seemed destined by fate to play a conspicuous part in the world; but she could not understand
him. Seeing that all those who were near to him in any way seemed to rise or fall with his
prosperity, she did not understand how justice and morals were arranged in this world. There
seemed to be certain general principles--or people assumed there were--but apparently there
were exceptions. Assuredly her brother abided by no known rule, and yet he seemed to be
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