"Well, I didn't _know_, you see," she murmured, pawing at him vaguely, in a fitful and inefficient essay at some coquettish art, grotesque in these conditions. She was a woman of small feminine charm at best. She sat there now, angular, stiff, unbeautiful, the sort of woman no clothes can make well-dressed. Already she had disclosed somewhat of her soul. What appeal, then, physical, emotional, moral, could she make to him--a student, a visionary, an idealist--at such a moment? And did there not remain that same cool distant figure from whom he had so constantly to wrench his eyes--and his heart? Yes; and his heart! Halsey's face was dull red. He was unhappy. The world seemed to him only a hideous nightmare, full of disappointments, injustices, of wrongs that cried aloud for righting. Ah, the comparison now was here, fair and full and unavoidable! VII "No, you didn't know," said he slowly. "A lot of people don't. Now let me tell you a few things more. You didn't know that something like a year ago your father told me that he'd make me a present of fifty-thousand dollars the day I could run a car from the factory to this place on a charge taken from our own overhead receiver-motors." "A start for a million dollars!" she murmured. "You get _that_--when you succeed?" "Yes, that is to say, I could have had that any day in the week these past eight months--if he really has got that much left where he can realize on it. He's pretty well spread out." "Then you have had it--what have you done with the money?" "I presume I look as though I'd spent or could spend a mere fifty thousand dollars or so, don't I?" was his quiet answer. "No, I didn't have it, and I haven't got it. I'll say this much to you, however, that I ran my little old car over here _to-night_ on a charge taken out of one of the overhead receiver-motors of the International Power Company--a motor completed on my own ideas, and by my own hands. It's mine, I tell you--_mine_!" "Charley!" She caught him by the wrists, with both hands, eagerly. "You can give me the things I've got used to having! I'll go back--oh! I'll go back--we'll go on together! I hate her so--you don't know!" "That's nice of you, Grace; but you've guessed wrong. I've not got that fifty thousand yet." "But you _can_ have." "Yes, I can. What could I buy with it? For one thing, I could buy back my wife?" "But Charley! We're rich! You've succeeded!" "No, I am poor, I've failed. I'm just beginning to see how _much_ I've failed!" "If you don't tell me the truth about this I'll do it myself!" she exclaimed fiercely. "You've not been loyal--you've taken pay!" "Your father took his pay from me," was his half-savage answer. "He's been paid enough! As for me, I don't want any more of this sort of pay." "What are you going to do--you're not going to sell out to some one else?"