Crane remained perfectly silent. He did not speak a word from the time they left Senator Bicknell’s house until they reached home. Annette said nothing to him. The conviction was deepening in her mind that her husband had secretly behaved ill to Senator Bicknell. Crane had revealed unconsciously that night many things which Senator Bicknell had not understood, but which Annette understood only too well. The slight agitation and discomposure which Crane had shown was not the mere shock of a grateful surprise. Annette detected that every word Crane had uttered to Senator Bicknell was false; that his apparent acceptance of the offer was false. The money was much--much to her; the loss of it, after it had been held up to her gaze, would be much; but the loss of Crane’s integrity--ah, could that but be preserved, she would go out and dig for him and for her children! She would slave, she would starve, she would do anything that any woman ever did, that she might feel her children were the children of an honest man. She remembered there was such a thing as heredity, and she trembled at the thought that, if Crane were really a scoundrel, as Senator Bicknell had said Governor Sanders was, her little black-eyed Roger might be a scoundrel, too, before he died. These thoughts, surging through her mind, kept her silent. Crane felt her silence to be ominous as she felt his to be. As he sat dumb, by her side, his agitation increased instead of diminishing. On what possible ground could he excuse to Annette, as well as Senator Bicknell, his declination of such an offer? But he could not accept it--he was not yet a thorough villain. Had he been a free agent, he would have preferred the splendid vista of power and preferment opened to him by his deal with Sanders to more money even than what was offered him; but he was not a free agent. He had promised Sanders, and if his nerve failed him he would be ruined by Sanders politically, and perhaps personally as well. True, Sanders did not have a line of his writing--such agreements as theirs are not put on paper--nor had he, so far, borrowed a dollar from Sanders, although he expected to do so the first of the year when his notes fell due. While he was thinking these thoughts, he found himself before the door of the great caravanserai where they lived, and presently he was sitting in their little drawing-room alone at last, and face to face with the strange circumstances which had befallen him. He sat in a great arm-chair drawn up to the embers of the fire. On the table at his elbow a light was burning. He heard Annette go into the children’s room and remain five minutes--she always said a little prayer above their cribs every night before she slept--then she went into her own room.