The Maid of Maiden Lane

The thought of Hyde's probable visit and this way of escaping it made him laugh again; but it was a laughter that had that something terrible in it which makes the laughter of the insane and drunken and cruel, worse than the bitterest lamentation. He felt a sudden haste to escape himself, and seizing his hat walked rapidly to his father's office. Peter looked up as he entered, and the question in his eyes hardly needed the simple interrogatary-"Well then?"

"It is 'No.' I shall go to Boston early in the morning. I wish to go over the business with Blume and Otis, and to possess myself of all particulars."

"I have just heard that General Hyde came back this morning. He is now the Right Honourable the Earl of Hyde, and his son is, as you know, Lord George Hyde. Has this made a difference?"

"It has not. Let us count up what is owing to us. After all there is a certain good in gold."

"That is the truth. I am an old man and I have seen what altitudes the want of gold can abase, and what impossible things it makes possible. In any adversity gold can find friends."

"I shall count every half-penny after Blume and Otis."

"Be not too strict--too far east is west. You may lose all by demanding all."

Then the two men spent several hours in going over their accounts, and during this time no one called on Rem and he received no message. When he returned home he found affairs just as he had left them. "So far good," he thought, "I will let sleeping dogs lie. Why should I set them baying about my affairs? I will not do it"--and with this determination in his heart he fell asleep.

But Rem's sleep was the sleep of pure matter; his soul never knew the expansion and enlightenment and discipline of the oracles that speak in darkness. The winged dreams had no message or comfort for him, and he took no counsel from his pillow. His sleep was the sleep of tired flesh and blood, and heavy as lead. But the waking from such sleep--if there is trouble to meet--is like being awakened with a blow. He leaped to his feet, and the thought of his loss and the shame of it, and the horror of the dishonourable thing he had done, assailed him with a brutal force and swiftness. He was stunned by the suddenness and the inexorable character of his trouble. And he told himself it was "best to run away from what he could not fight." He had no fear of Hyde's interference so early in the morning, and once in Boston all attacks would lose much of their hostile virulence, by the mere influence of distance. He knew these were cowardly thoughts, but when a man knows he is in the wrong, he does not challenge his thoughts, he excuses them. And as soon as he was well on the road to Boston, he even began to assume that Hyde, full of the glory of his new position, would doubtless be well disposed to let all old affairs drop quietly "and if so," he mused, "Cornelia will not be so dainty, and I may get 'Yes' where I got 'No.'"