"Colonel Lamson is the one to have the thanks and the credit," Jerome repeated, pushing gently past her. His face was hot. He wondered, as he approached his house, if his own family had heard the news. As soon as he opened the door he saw that they had. Elmira did not lift a white, dumbly accusing face from her work; his father looked at him with curious, open-mouthed wonder; his mother spoke. "I want to know if it's true," she said. "Yes, mother, it is." "You've given it all away?" "Yes, mother." "Your own folks won't get none of it?" Jerome shook his head. He had a feeling as if he were denying his own flesh and blood; for the moment even his own conscience turned upon him, and accused him of injustice and lack of filial love and gratitude. Ann Edwards looked at her son, with a face of pale recrimination and awe. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it without a word. "I never had a black silk dress in my life," said she, finally, in a shaking voice, and that was all the reproach which she ever offered. "You shall have a black silk dress anyhow, mother," Jerome replied, piteously. He went out of the room, and his father got up and followed him, closing the door mysteriously. "That was a good deal to give away, J'rome," he whispered. "I know it, father, and I'll work my fingers to the bone to make it good to you and mother. That's all I've got to live for now." "J'rome," whispered the father, thrusting his old face into his son's, with an angelic expression. "What is it, father?" "_You shall have my fifteen hundred, an' build a new mill._" "Father, I'd _die_ before I'd touch a dollar of your money!" cried Jerome, passionately, and, tears in his eyes, flung away out to the barn, whither he was bound, to feed the horse. He watched all day for a chance to speak alone to Elmira, but she gave him none, until after supper that night. Then, when he beckoned her into the parlor, she followed him. "Elmira," he said, "don't feel any worse about this than you can help. I had to do it." "If you care more about strangers than you do about your own, that is all there is to it," she said, in a quiet voice, looking coldly in his face. "Elmira, it isn't that. You don't understand." "I have said all I have to say." "Let me tell you--" "I have heard all I want to." "Elmira, don't give up so. Maybe things will be brighter somehow. I had to do my duty." "It is a noble thing to do your duty," she said, with a bitter smile on her little face. Elmira, that night, seemed like a stranger to Jerome, and maybe to herself. Despair had upstirred from the depths of her nature strange, tigerish instincts, which otherwise might have slept there unmanifest forever. She also had not failed to appreciate Jerome's action in all its bearings upon herself and Lawrence Prescott, and, when she heard of it, had given up all her longing hope of happiness. "You have to do it, whether it is noble or not," returned Jerome.