Yet in the end the woman held him to her ideal. Late that night he consented to telegraph Wheeler of his immediate return, and to take the first train on the morrow for the west, there to await the coroner's summons. "I shall go on with you, of course," she said. "We will all go,--the boys, too. Mamma will stay and close the house. Perhaps you can't get away very soon after it is over. And I want to be there with you," she answered to all his objections. "You know what it will mean!" he exclaimed warningly, as the last log burst into ashes on the hearth. "Nell, it's worst for you and the boys. It means ruin, nothing less!" "Never!" she protested with flashing eyes. "Other people, the newspapers, can't make ruin. Ruin is in ourselves. It merely means that we shall have to do without friends, and society, and things, especially things. And I have come to hate things. They make one small and mean. I never thought we should have them, when we were married. And I don't want them for the boys, either. There is work! the best thing in life,--work for itself, without pay in things, without bribes! We'll have that and bread, Francis!" "But the public disgrace," he objected, still sensitive to the opinion of the world in which he had lived. "Better even that than the disgrace between us," she whispered. "No, no! There is no other way." At least there was no other way to her love, and that love he could not live without, cost him what it might. "You are strong, Nell!" he confessed his admiration. "And you, too!" she whispered back, her face illumined with the courage of her nature. Little Powers, the younger boy, had not been well, and the next morning, when he was no better, Jackson urged that it would be unwise to take him, that he had best go back alone. But Helen would not consent, knowing that he made the most of the child's illness to spare her the trial which was to come. "It is nothing," she said. "Mother thinks it will do no harm to take him. And if he is going to be really sick, it would be better for us to be there in the city than here." So they drove over to Verulam and took the train. After the boys had been put to bed for the night, Helen came back to the section where the architect was sitting, looking dully into the blank fields. "What do you think of this?" she exclaimed, putting a letter into his hands. "I got it just as we were leaving. It's from Venetia,--read it!" He took the thick envelope from her hands, remembering suddenly the girl as he had last seen her, when she had summed him up in one bitter, opprobrious word. The sting of that word had gone, however, effaced by the experience which he had suffered since, and he opened the letter listlessly. MY DEAR MOTHER SUPERIOR,--Do you recognize the Forest Park postmark? I am not going abroad after all. At least not just yet. Mother's gone, sails this week with Mrs. Ollie B. Now listen, and I'll make your hair stand on end.