Tom drove to the McCoy house and stopped. “You'd better clean up a little,” he said without looking at Hugh. “You go in and shave and change your clothes. I'm going up-town. I got to go to a store.” Driving a short distance along the road, Tom stopped and shouted. “You might pack your grip and bring it along,” he called. “You'll be needing your things. We won't be back here to-day.” The two men stayed together all that day, and in the evening Tom took Hugh to the farmhouse and stayed for the evening meal. “He was a little drunk,” he explained to Clara. “Don't be hard on him. He was a little drunk.” For both Clara and Hugh that evening was the hardest of their lives. After the servants had gone, Clara sat under a lamp in the dining-room and pretended to read a book and in desperation Hugh also tried to read. Again the time came to go upstairs to the bedroom, and again Clara led the way. She went to the door of the room from which Hugh had fled and opening it stepped aside. Then she put out her hand. “Good-night,” she said, and going down a hallway went into another room and closed the door. Hugh's experience with the school teacher was repeated on that second night in the farmhouse. He took off his shoes and prepared for bed. Then he crept out into the hallway and went softly to the door of Clara's room. Several times he made the journey along the carpeted hallway, and once his hand was on the knob of the door, but each time he lost heart and returned to his own room. Although he did not know it Clara, like Rose McCoy on that other occasion, expected him to come to her, and knelt on the floor just inside the door, waiting, hoping for, and fearing the coming of the man. Unlike the school teacher, Clara wanted to help Hugh. Marriage had perhaps given her that impulse, but she did not follow it, and when at last Hugh, shaken and ashamed, gave up the struggle with himself, she arose and went to her bed where she threw herself down and wept, as Hugh had wept standing in the darkness of the fields on the night before. CHAPTER XX It was a hot, dusty day, a week after Hugh's marriage to Clara, and Hugh was at work in his shop at Bidwell. How many days, weeks, and months he had already worked there, thinking in iron--twisted, turned, tortured to follow the twistings and turnings of his mind--standing all day by a bench beside other workmen--before him always the little piles of wheels, strips of unworked iron and steel, blocks of wood, the paraphernalia of the inventor's trade. Beside him, now that money had come to him, more and more workmen, men who had invented nothing, who were without distinction in the life of the community, who had married no rich man's daughter. In the morning the other workmen, skillful fellows, who knew as Hugh had never known, the science of their iron craft, came straggling through the shop door into his presence. They were a little embarrassed before him. The greatness of his name rang in their minds.