"I haven't the least doubt of it. We don't do things by halves in Boston."
"He ought to have had a coat of his noncombustible paint on it," said another gentleman of the party.
Penelope pulled her father away toward the first carriage she could reach of a number that had driven up. "Here, father! get into this."
"No, no; I couldn't ride," he answered heavily, and he walked home in silence. He greeted his wife with, "Well, Persis, our house is gone! And I guess I set it on fire myself;" and while he rummaged among the papers in his desk, still with his coat and hat on, his wife got the facts as she could from Penelope. She did not reproach him. Here was a case in which his self-reproach must be sufficiently sharp without any edge from her. Besides, her mind was full of a terrible thought.
"O Silas," she faltered, "they'll think you set it on fire to get the insurance!"
Lapham was staring at a paper which he held in his hand. "I had a builder's risk on it, but it expired last week. It's a dead loss."
"Oh, thank the merciful Lord!" cried his wife.
"Merciful!" said Lapham. "Well, it's a queer way of showing it."
He went to bed, and fell into the deep sleep which sometimes follows a great moral shock. It was perhaps rather a torpor than a sleep.