But if in her heroic soul she was ready to pay, and to make him pay, at the price of public shame for her and her children, the full penalty of his misdeeds, it was not to be so. He was to escape the full measure of retribution, shielded by the accident of his class. Unknown to him, the tangled threads of his fate were being sorted in the great city, and the vengeance of society was being averted, so far, at least, as legal punishment was concerned. Everett Wheeler, once recovered from his disgust at the sentimental folly of the architect\'s confession at the inquest, had no mind to see his cousin on trial for manslaughter. His mood was invariably to settle things, to cover them up, to bury them! As has been said, he had political influence, enough to reach even to the district attorney\'s office, enough to close the mouth of the Chicago Buzzard, to quiet the snarls of the Thunderer. So the case against the men held to the Grand Jury for the hotel disaster was quietly dropped. The mayor put another man in Bloom\'s place as chief building inspector, and very soon things went merrily on in their old way. And that was the end of it all! The seventeen human beings who had lost their lives in the fire had not even pointed a moral by their agonizing death. For a few summer months the gaunt, smoke-blackened pit of ruins on the boulevard served to remind the passers-by of a grewsome tale. Then, by the beginning of the new year, in its place rose a splendid apartment building, faced with cut stone and trimmed with marble.

Wheeler notified the architect in a curt note that the case had been dismissed, and Jackson showed the letter to his wife.

"Thank God!" he exclaimed fervently, "that is the end. I shan\'t drag you into the mud any farther."

Helen looked up from the lawyer\'s letter with a troubled face. She had hardened herself to the coming trial, which she had fully expected. Now that it had been spared, all was not yet right to her scrupulous perception. A terrible wrong had been committed, a wrong to the poor souls who had lost their lives, a wrong, too, to the city and to society, making an evil pool of corruption. And in some mysterious way this had been covered up, hidden, and all was to go on as before! She had a primitive idea that all evil necessitated exact payment, and as long as this payment was deferred, so long was the day of light, of health, put off.

But the man, realizing more clearly than she the indirect penalties which his situation inevitably imposed, gave no further thought to the abstract question of justice. The outlook was bad enough as it was. He saw nothing before him in this city where he naturally belonged.

"What would you think of our moving to St. Louis?" he asked, a few days after he had received the lawyer\'s letter. "There is some sort of an opening there for me. Of course I had rather be in New York, but it is out of the question. It would take too long to get started. Or we might try Denver. I have done some work there, and it\'s a growing place."

"Do you think that we must leave Chicago?" she asked.

"Why!" he exclaimed, surprised that she should consider for a moment the possibility of their remaining where he had made such a failure of his life. "Do you want to stay here and be dropped by every soul you have known?"

"I don\'t care very much for that!"

"Well, there\'s nothing here for me. Stewart will take the office. He let me know mighty quick that we had better part! I am a dead dog in Chicago. Only yesterday I got a letter from the Kicker Brothers turning me down after telling me last month to go ahead. They pay for the work done so far, and that is all. You see it is out of the question to stay here!"

He spoke gloomily, as if in spite of all that had happened he had some grounds for feeling a little sore.

"But I don\'t mean to let this down me, not yet," he continued more buoyantly. "I owe it to you, at least, to make good. And I can do it somewhere else, where the sight of this mess isn\'t always in my eyes! It\'ll only be a matter of a few years, Nell."

Already the bitterness of the crisis was passing away, and he was beginning to plan for the future, for a career, for success,—built on a surer foundation, but nevertheless success and repute in the world. His wife realized it and understood. She was standing by his side, as he sat with his elbows resting on his knees, studying the faded figure in the carpet. She put her hands on his head and drew it toward her, protectingly, pityingly, as she would the bruised head of a child.

"So you think you must begin somewhere else?" she said gently, sitting down by his side.

"It\'s the only thing to do. The question is where!"

She made no reply and seemed buried in her thoughts.

"By the way," he remarked, "whom do you think I saw on the street to-day? Wright. He was staring at Letterson\'s new store,—you know Frank Peyton did it. The old man stopped me and seemed really glad to see me. I suppose he knows everything, too," he added musingly.

The incident comforted him greatly. He had seen Wright in the crowded street, and had looked away from him, meaning to hurry past, but the older man had stretched out his long arm and good-naturedly drawn Hart to one side out of the press of the street.

"How are you, Hart?" he had said cordially, with his boyish smile. "What do you think of this thing? Bold, isn\'t it? That Peyton\'s got nerve to put up this spiderweb right here in State Street. Now, I couldn\'t do that! But I guess he\'s on the right track. That\'s what we are coming to. What do you think?"

They had walked down the street together, and Wright had continued to talk of Peyton and the other young architects in the city, and of their work.

"I tell you, those youngsters have got the future. They have the courage to try experiments. That won\'t do for an old fellow like me. My clients would kick, too, if I took to anything new. But I like to see the young ones try it.... What are you doing?" he had asked abruptly. "Come in to see me, won\'t you? I shall be here two or three weeks. Be sure to come in, now!"

They had shaken hands, and the older architect had looked searchingly into Hart\'s face, his boyish smile changing subtly into an expression of concern and sweetness, as if there was something on the tip of his tongue which he refrained from saying there in the crowded street. The memory of the little meeting came back to the man now, and he felt more grateful for Wright\'s cordiality than he had at the time.

"Wright asked me to come in and see him. I think I will do it some day," he remarked presently.

"Why not give up the idea of starting your own office?" Helen asked suddenly, her thoughts having come to a definite point.

"What do you mean? Try something else? It would be pretty risky," he answered doubtfully, surprised that she should want him to abandon his profession, to admit defeat.

"I didn\'t mean that, exactly. It wouldn\'t do at all for you to give up architecture. That never entered my mind. Only—listen!"

She slipped from the lounge where she had been sitting and knelt beside him, taking the lapels of his coat in her hands, her face aglow with a sudden enthusiasm.

"I\'ve been thinking of so many things these last months, and lately, while Powers has been so sick, I\'ve thought of everything since we were in Italy together, since I loved you,—all those talks we had, and the plans we made, the work you did, the sketches—those first ones." She paused, trying to put her tumultuous thoughts in order.

"I grow so slowly! I was so ignorant of everything, of myself and you in those days. It has taken me a long time, dear, to understand, to grow up!" she exclaimed, her lips trembling in a little smile.

"We stumbled almost at the start, you and I. You started your office and worked hard, always striving to get ahead, to get us comforts and position, and not because you liked the things you were doing. You took anything that promised to bring in money. And it got worse and worse, the more we had. It used to trouble me then, \'way back, but I didn\'t know what was the matter with it all. We lived out there with all those rich people around us. And those we knew that weren\'t very rich were all trying to get richer, to have the same things the others had. We did what they did, and thought what they thought, and tried to live as they did. It wasn\'t honest!"

"What do you mean by that?" he asked blankly.

"I\'ll say it clearly; just give me time, dear! It is true, but it is made up of so many little, unimportant trifles. You worked just to get money, and we spent it all on ourselves, or pretty nearly all. And the more we had, the more we seemed to need. No man ought to work that way! It ruins him in the end. That\'s why there are so many common, brutal men and women everywhere. They work for the pay, and for nothing else."

"Oh, not always."

"Most of those we knew did," she replied confidently.

"Well, it\'s the law of life," he protested with a touch of his old superiority in his tone.

"No, it isn\'t, it isn\'t!" she exclaimed vehemently. "Never! There are other laws. Work is good in itself, not just for the pay, and we must live so that the pay makes less difference, so that we haven\'t to think of the pay!"

"I don\'t see what this has to do with our going to St. Louis!" he interjected impatiently, disinclined for a theoretic discussion of the aims of life, when the question of bread and butter was immediately pressing.

"But it has, Francis, dear. It has! If you go there, you will try to live the old way. You will try to get ahead, to struggle up in the world, as it is called, and that is the root of all the trouble! That is what I have come to see a............