They sat down on the crumbling stone wall to wait for them, and presently, catching sight of their father, they came tumbling over the wall with cries of "Dad, it's dad—he's come!" and together they all went on to the house.
Mrs. Spellman received her son-in-law in her equable, unknowing manner, as if she had expected him to arrive on that day. After supper she took the boys to their room while husband and wife sat in the west parlor, which the architect remembered just as it was this day, with the same faded drab carpet, the brass fire-irons, and worn furniture. The high-backed walnut writing-table stood in its familiar corner beside the window. Outside, a drooping elm branch swept softly across the glass pane. Nothing here was altered, nothing added, save the new lives of the modern generation. They watched the leaping flames lick the fire-eaten bricks of the old fireplace for a time, and then he turned to her with a sigh:—
"Now I must tell you the whole story, Nell."
"Yes," she answered, letting her hand fall softly on his arm. "Tell me everything."
And he began slowly to tell her the story as he had lived through it that night when he lay exhausted on the earth beneath the stars—the story of his work in the city, of the acts which for eight years he had hidden from all, even himself. He explained as well as he could the tangled web of his dealings with the contractor from the day when he had met him in the Canostota until the time of the arrangement over the school and the hotel. When he came to the end, to the horrible fire which had licked up the fraudulent Glenmore before his own eyes, hot tears fell upon his hands, which his wife held tightly in hers, and he could feel her body tremble against his.
"And that was the end! It made me see in one flash what it all meant. Of course, those men and women might have been caught anyway, no matter how well the building was put up,—there's no telling,—and Graves would have done the same job whether I had been in with him or not. Still, that doesn't count. When I saw them there, trapped, fighting helplessly for their lives, I felt as if I had stood by and let them be murdered—and made money by it, too!"
The horror of those minutes revived as he went over the story, and he paused wearily.
"Somehow," he resumed, "it was all of a piece—dirty work. Everything I had touched, pretty nearly, since I had started seemed rotten. It made me sick all over.... Well, that was the end. I went to Everett and tried to square the school matter as well as I could. I gave him all I had made out of it and more,—about every dollar I had. It leaves us where we started. But, Nell, I knew you would want me to do that first before I came here."
It seemed a pitifully trivial act, now that he had told it, yet he was glad that he could give her this proof of his sincerity. She said nothing, but she raised her eyes, still filled with tears, to his face with a calm, answering look.
"It's a bad story, as bad as it could well be," he resumed. "I see it clearly enough now. I wanted uncle's money, wanted the easy time, and the good things, and all that. Then when I didn't get it, I went in to make a big success and have the things I was after, anyhow. I saw men out there no more able than I who were making a lot of money, and nothing seemed to count so long as somehow you made good. I wanted to make good. It was a pretty cheap ambition."