the whole thing not right? Through this sacrifice were not a good woman and a helpless child escaping shame and misery? True, he had made a misstep, but so had Charles. It would be comforting to know that, in a sense, he and Charles were on a sort of level. Ah, but they were not--they were not! Pragmatically tested, they were different. Charles was now living in the joyful consciousness that a great good was to come out of his self-renunciation; but it was vastly different with the man for whom the renunciation had been made. William had never loved his brother so much as now. He had never before been capable of such a love. From the depths of the pit into which he had fallen Charles appeared as a far-off superman. William might have wept, but men do not weep while in terror, and William was afraid. After all, he asked himself, with a start, how could he be sure that his secret transactions in stocks might not be ferreted out by this same McCurdy, or some one else? These facts brought to light and the authorities would readily see through the thin ruse that was being perpetrated. For more than two hours he walked, here and there. He crossed the bridge to Cambridge. His dull stare swept the various college buildings and stately clubs, but they only reminded him of Charles and what Charles was doing for him. Why, the day Charles was graduated his friends had honored him with--But why think of trivialities? Perhaps at the bank some further discovery was being made. Had he covered his tracks completely? How could he tell? He turned abruptly homeward. He would plead a headache; he would shut himself in his room; he would explain nothing to Celeste. She would wonder, but the newspapers would tell her all. CHAPTER X Alone in his little room, Charles became conscious of a vast sense of fatigue, induced, no doubt, by the fact that his fears concerning his brother's fate were now allayed. Removing his coat and shoes, he threw himself on the hard, narrow bed and was soon soundly asleep. He did not awaken till three o'clock in the afternoon, and might have slept longer but for the harsh sound of a truck delivering coal through a sheet-iron chute into the basement of a house next door. He lay for several minutes trying to recall some vaguely delectable and flitting dreams he had just been enjoying. Somehow, by sheer contrast to their evanescent quality, the sordid little room and its meager furnishings produced a depression that had not come to him since the beginning of his flight. His thoughts were on his home, and he was all but faint under the sharp realization that it was his home no longer.