“I am glad,” he said obediently, “that you are safe through with it.”
“And you had better be,” she cried. “I don’t know what your children would have done without me,—such a father as they have! Here! don’t you care to see your baby?”
She pulled the cover from its face, and he inspected it with the same dull obedience, but beginning now to be unpleasantly conscious of Anna’s angry eyes. Yet all the while the old love was tugging at her heartstrings, as she read in his face and bearing the story of his failure. But she would not spare him; Anna had not learned to spare either herself or others.
“And your invention? Of course that was a failure, as I always told you!”
“Yes,” he said in English, recalling the words of the ticket-clerk, “yes, it was no go.”
“And the money all wasted, and your place thrown away, and my children starving!” she cried, her voice growing louder and shriller with each particular; “and now the great stupid fool tells me it was no go. No go!” She broke into wild, hysterical laughter, and beat upon her head with her work-worn hands.
They must have turned him out of the room, Leppel supposed, for he found himself in the open air without very well knowing how he came there. There was a heavy fog; and, well though he knew the streets, he was again surprised to find himself suddenly standing upon the bridge across the Mickle River, which at this season of the year, especially after such mild weather as had lately prevailed, was apt to be very high, and, with the melting of the snow in the mountains, to overflow its banks, and work mischief to all in its way.
Leppel stood for some moments stupidly and fixedly regarding the swift, turbid current. Did he lose his balance? Was he seized with sudden giddiness? Or was it a deliberate plunge? No one ever knew.
The policeman who saw him fall had help upon the spot as quickly as it was possible to do so; but it was only the earthly frame of Leopold Rolf that was rescued from the angry waters. The soul of the man whose invention would not pay had gone to carry its cause before the Great Inventor, the Maker of heaven and earth.