Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/413

 fern grows six feet in the season, but it takes a hundred years to grow a fir. The civilization which you created, Boland, has reduced itself to the ashes you see around you."

This was the final unanswerable argument. Ashes—failure! By it Boland was crushed and self-convicted. He reached for a chair and sank into it. There was nothing left but—but this young man who had weakened so incomprehensibly but now seemed to have grown strong again. He reached an appealing hand across the table. "You—you won't refuse—the receivership?" he implored.

"Yes, Boland; I do refuse it," he answered decisively. "And in saying my say to you, I think I've done my last duty to the town of Edgewater. Good day!"

John Boland started and stared, then wet a pendent lip. This was refusal, flat and final; it was also dismissal, so curt and imperative that no course was left him but to accept it. Rebuked and rebuffed, he gathered what shreds of dignity remained to him into the stiffest bow that he could manage and went out, baffled in mind, buffeted in spirit, wondering what could possibly have made Henry Harrington so hard.

On his part, Henry watched that departure with a vast deal of satisfaction. "I guess I made him look crooked, what! Even to himself," he reflected, recalling that last word with Scanlon—who was upstairs now in the cell de luxe.