That small fragment of Chicago society which had known the Jackson Harts, and interested itself in their doings, was mildly stirred over the news that the brilliant and promising young architect had been obliged to close his office, and had gone to work for his old employer. Indeed, for some weeks the Harts furnished the Forest Park dinner-tables with a fresh topic of conversation that took the place of the strikes and poor Anthony Crawford\'s scattered fortune. It contained quite as much food for marvel and moral reflection as either of the others.

More information about the architect\'s troubles than that provided by the press had got abroad in Forest Park and the Shoreham Club. It was well known, for instance, that Hart had been obliged to dissolve his partnership with Freddie Stewart, owing to grave business irregularities, which extended beyond his connection with the recent disaster. It was generally agreed that his offences must have been very grave indeed to necessitate, at his age, with his influential connection, such a radical change of caste as had happened. Men commonly expressed their contempt because at a crisis he had shown such a deplorable "lack of nerve." They said, and among them were some of the architect\'s more intimate friends, that nothing he had done could justify this tame submission. "Why!" Mrs. Phillips exclaimed when she heard of it, "we\'ve seen men live down things ten times worse. There was Peter Sewall, and old Preston, and the banker Potts, and a dozen more. They are as good as any of us to-day! And he needn\'t have told everything he knew, anyhow, to that old coroner." The measure of a man\'s guilt, in her eyes and those of many others, was what he was willing to admit to the world. "But it\'s that wife of his!" the widow continued bitterly. "She never had any spirit; she was cut out for a clerk\'s wife. I have always felt that she was responsible for Venetia\'s trouble. Well, she\'s got to her level at last!"

Finally, this portion of the great public held that under the circumstances the architect had shown singularly little judgment in staying on in the city: there was no "future" for him, under the circumstances, in Chicago. If he felt himself unable to hold his own against scandal, they argued, he should have the wit to leave the city where he had gone wrong and seek his fortune under new skies, where the faces of his successful friends would not remind him constantly of ignoble defeat.

Not that Jackson Hart had many opportunities of encountering his successful friends in the great city of Chicago. He had resigned from his club, and the Harts had moved very far away from the pleasant suburbs along the lake which were filled with their old acquaintances. They had gone to live in one of those flimsy flat-buildings in the southern part of the city, concerning which the architect had speculated the night the Glenmore was burned. It was near the street-car line, for the matter of a nickel fare was now of importance in their domestic economy. Occasionally, some one of the Forest Park ladies would report on her return from the city that she had run across Mrs. Hart at Steele\'s, "looking old and queerer than ever, dressed in the old things she wore out here, as if she didn\'t care whether school kept or not, poor thing!" But in the murky light of Steele\'s great shop, they could not have seen the serene, almost radiant beauty of the woman\'s face, the beauty of a soul content with its vision of the world, in harmony with itself.

And Jackson, "reduced to the ranks" by a few grades, in that career of his, which he dubbed good-humoredly "From shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves, in three acts," was developing certain patient virtues of inestimable charm in the domestic circles of plain life, though not essential for brilliant success. In his box of an office next Wright\'s large draughting-room, he worked almost side by side with his former draughtsman Cook, who had also come back to the old firm. For some months they hardly spoke to each other; indeed, the men in Wright\'s generally held aloof from Hart. But they have accepted him at last. Cook has begun, even, to regain some of his old admiration for his chief, comprehending, perhaps, that in the office by his side there is slowly working out a career of real spiritual significance, if of little outward display.

As to Wright, who knows more of the man\'s real story than the others, he treats his old employee with a fine consideration and respect, realizing that this man is doing handsomely a thing that few men have the character to do at all. His admiration for Hart\'s work has grown, also, and he frankly admits that the younger man has a better talent for architecture than he himself ever possessed, as well as great cleverness and ingenuity, so necessary in an art which is intimately allied with mechanics. For it is true that after sluggish years there has revived within Hart the creative impulse, that spirit of the artist, inherent to some extent in all men, which makes the work of their hands an engrossing joy. The plans of a group of buildings, which the firm have undertaken for a university in a far Western state, have been entrusted very largely to Hart. As they grow from month to month in the voluminous sheets of drawings, they are becoming the pride of the office. And Wright generously allots the praise for their beauty where it largely belongs.

Thus the social waters of the fast-living city are rapidly rolling over the Jackson Harts. In all probability they will never again in this life come to the surface, and call for comment; for the architect and his wife have already sunk into the insignificance of the common lot, so much praised by the poets, so much despised by our good Americans of the "strenuous" school. They have had their opportunities to better themselves in the worldly scale, but there has never been any question between husband and wife of a change in their social or material condition. They even contemplate with equanimity leaving their children in the universal struggle no better equipped than with the possession of health and a modest education,—there to meet their fate as their parents have done before them.


Almost the last public appearance of the Jackson Harts in that portion of the Chicago world which had formerly known them occurred at the elaborate dedicatory exercises of the JACKSON INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE. When the handsomely engraved invitation came to them, the architect was disinclined to attend; but Helen, who thought only of the old man\'s probable wish in the matter, induced her husband to take her. The exercises were held in the pretty little auditorium which occupied one wing of the large school building. There was much ceremony, and numerous speeches, besides the oration delivered by the director, Dr. Everest, on "Modern Industrialism," which was considered a masterpiece of its kind and was afterwards printed and circulated by the trustees. A bust of the founder, which fronted the stage, was first unveiled amid great ap............