“I’m not going back,” he declared. “I’m through with Blakeville. Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she admitted, pondering it slowly. “I could be happy here always, or, if not here, wherever you are. But your business back there, Jim?”
He chuckled.
“I have no business there,” he told her. “My business is concluded. I borrowed forty-five thousand dollars on that forty acres of sticky mud, and I think I’ll just let the bank foreclose.”
She looked at him a moment, dry-eyed and dry-lipped.
“You’re joking,” she protested, in a low voice.
“Not at all,” he seriously assured her.
They looked at each other steadily for some moments, and gradually Wallingford saw beneath those eyes a spirit that he might conquer, but, having conquered, would always regret.
“It’s—it’s a swindle!” she gasped, as the true situation began to dawn upon her. “You don’t mean, Jim, that you are a swindler!”
“No, I wouldn’t call it that,” he objected, considering the matter carefully. “It is only rather a shrewd deal in the game of business. The law can’t touch me for it unless they should chase down Vittoreo Matteo and find him to be a fraud, and prove that I knew it!”