Have suffered a temporary reversal.
Those were the words that the capitalist read when the message, after being decoded from its cipher, was laid on his desk.
Harrison, recently returned from his Southern trip, thought truculently of that nearby office in which 251 Trabue was also receiving telegraphic information, and he writhed in the wormwood of chagrin.
The curtness of his response scorched the wires:
Explain in person if you can. Otherwise we separate.
So John Spurrier packed his bag and caught the first train for the mountains. He must say good-by to Glory, before facing this final ordeal, and he believed that in that clarifying air he could brace himself for the encounter that awaited him in New York.
As he turned into the yard of his own house he paused, and something about his heart tightened until it unsteadied him. Here alone, in all the world, he had known what home meant, and in his heart and veins rose an intoxicating tumult like that of wine.
Back of that emotional wave though lurked a misery of self-reproach. Glory had made the magic of his brief happiness, but there was a background, too, of kindly souls and a ruggedly genuine welcome. He had learned to know these people and to revise his first, false views of them. In them dwelt the stout honesty and real strength of oak and hickory.
First he had striven to plunder them, then sought to lift the yoke of poverty from their long-bowed shoulders. In both efforts he had failed.
But had he failed, after all? Certainly he stood under the black shadow of a major disaster, but had not others retrieved disasters and made final victory only the brighter for its contrast with lurid misfortune?