"Of course you can't, Miss Adelaide. No truly good woman can. Business, especially of the vasty kind is a devil incarnate in her pure eyes." "And it seems to me that your kind of business is the worst of all, Mr. Bombs, and that there's no need of it in this world." "Can't you think of something more consoling? This is your last chance. I am going to the city tomorrow to see King Pang beat himself in his twenty-fifth saturnalia of fire. Then to Chicago to see him help the Chicagoians beat the St. Louis dedication and re-burn the city. After that I will start out on what you have called my 'worst of all business.'" Adelaide thought of Laurens Cornwallis' tragic death, of Mary Langley's fright and the poor man with the exhausted lungs; but she did not speak until the silence had become unbearable to Mr. Bombs and he asked: "What is it, Miss Adelaide? Why don't you speak out?" "Hush! Mr. Bombs. I am listening! I thought I heard a voice. Your mother's or mine." They were discouraging words for the last--almost cruel he thought for him who had known nothing of mother love and very little of parental care. They made him feel like a savage almost. He went to Miss Drawling for an offset. He knew he could get enough encouragement there and he did find more than enough. Not but what he liked her flattery but the personality behind it. Faugh! It was simply disgusting. Any woman who could think and talk as she did, was worse than a man. She was a brute. Would it be ever thus, was one of the questions he asked himself. Was one truly loveable creature going to say things to him that would not be endurable in themselves and was another going to say opposite things which would make herself a creature to be abhorred. With the unreasonableness of the youthful man he hoped to find a mean between the two--that is a woman who would love himself most deeply and devotedly even while she was finding fault with and condoning his business enterprise. He did not realize it but it was as much as to say that he knew he was launching out in an unrighteous course; but that he was determined not to turn from it for the love of any creature whatever. Adelaide understood his attitude toward herself and she did not care a rush for it; but there was something about his attitude to others which she did not fully understand. It was struggling to light and it filled her soul with dread. CHAPTER XXI. ADELAIDE STAYS AT HOME WITH HER FATHER. Mr. Bombs did not go to Chicago alone nor as soon as he intended. He planned to go at the first breaking out of the Centennial, which was to be on the day when Chicago was exactly one hundred years old. The city was expected to be in an unusual state of ferment from the beginning; and many things were going to be done to herald the coming glory of the Jubilee week, among the most important of which was to be the much advertised re-burning of the city.