"We can live differently. I've often thought it would be better if we did, too."
"But I don't want to live differently. That's nonsense!"
They were silent for a little while before their unfinished thoughts. He broke the silence first:—
"Perhaps I ought to tell you that I've been caught in an—investment, some stocks I bought. A friend of mine advised me, a broker who is in with Rainbow. But the thing went wrong. I don't believe those fellows know as much as the man outside. Well, instead of making a good thing by it, I must find ten or twelve thousand dollars, and find it mighty quick. Now if I get this commission, I can borrow the money all right. I know who will let me have it. And then by the end of the year it will straighten out. And the next time I go to buy stocks, well—"
"But that building—the school?" Helen interrupted. She pulled a thin dressing-sack over her shoulders and sat down on the edge of the bed, looking breathlessly into his face. What he had said about his losses in the stock market had made no impression on her. "That work is uncle Powers's gift, his legacy to the people. You can't do it just to make money out of it!"
"Why not?" he demanded shortly, and then added, with a dry little laugh: "I should say that building rather than any other. I'd like to pick up a few crumbs from the old man's cake. It's only common justice, seeing he did me out of all the rest."
She stared at him with bewildered eyes. Perhaps she was not a very quick woman, if after five years of daily contact with her husband she did not know his nature. But the conceptions she had cherished of him were too deep to be effaced at once. She could not even yet understand what he meant.
"'Did you out of all the rest'?" she queried in a low voice.
"Yes!" he exclaimed hardily. "And I think the trustees should take it into consideration that I didn't contest the will when I had the best kind of case and could have given them no end of trouble. I was a fool to knuckle under so quickly. I might at least have had an agreement with them about this matter."
"So," she said, "you want to build the school to make up what you think uncle should have given you?"