Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favour that this is so.They may be right; and at any rate, the blank misgiving, the recurring sense of disappointment to which the young people's departure left the Coreys is to be considered.That was the end of their son and brother for them; they felt that; and they were not mean or unamiable people.
He remained three years away.Some changes took place in that time.One of these was the purchase by the Kanawha Falls Company of the mines and works at Lapham.
The transfer relieved Lapham of the load of debt which he was still labouring under, and gave him an interest in the vaster enterprise of the younger men, which he had once vainly hoped to grasp all in his own hand.He began to tell of this coincidence as something very striking;and pushing on more actively the special branch of the business left to him, he bragged, quite in his old way, of its enormous extension.His son-in-law, he said, was pushing it in Mexico and Central America: an idea that they had originally had in common.Well, young blood was what was wanted in a thing of that kind.Now, those fellows out in West Virginia: all young, and a perfect team!
For himself, he owned that he had made mistakes; he could see just where the mistakes were--put his finger right on them.
But one thing he could say: he had been no man's enemy but his own; every dollar, every cent had gone to pay his debts;he had come out with clean hands.He said all this, and much more, to Mr.Sewell the summer after he sold out, when the minister and his wife stopped at Lapham on their way across from the White Mountains to Lake Champlain;Lapham had found them on the cars, and pressed them to stop off.
There were times when Mrs.Lapham had as great pride in the clean-handedness with which Lapham had come out as he had himself, but her satisfaction was not so constant.
At those times, knowing the temptations he had resisted, she thought him the noblest and grandest of men; but no woman could endure to live in the same house with a perfect hero, and there were other times when she reminded him that if he had kept his word to her about speculating in stocks, and had looked after the insurance of his property half as carefully as he had looked after a couple of worthless women who had no earthly claim on him, they would not be where they were now.He humbly admitted it all, and left her to think of Rogers herself.She did not fail to do so, and the thought did not fail to restore him to her tenderness again.
I do not know how it is that clergymen and physicians keep from telling their wives the secrets confided to them;perhaps they can trust their wives to find them out for themselves whenever they wish.Sewell had laid before his wife the case of the Laphams after they came to consult with him about Corey's proposal to Penelope, for he wished to be confirmed in his belief that he had advised them soundly; but he had not given her their names, and he had not known Corey's himself.Now he had no compunctions in talking the affair over with her without the veil of ignorance which she had hitherto assumed, for she declared that as soon as she heard of Corey's engagement to Penelope, the whole thing had flashed upon her.
"And that night at dinner I could have told the child that he was in love with her sister by the way he talked about her; I heard him; and if she had not been so blindly in love with him herself, she would have known it too.
