wrong with her?  What was she going to do?  Where go?  She had no idea, of course, for how long a term of years he would be sent away.  It might be one year or it might be five years, as the papers had said.  Good heavens!  The children could almost come to forget him in five years.  She put her other hand to her mouth, also, and then to her forehead, where there was a dull ache.  She tried to think further than this, but somehow, just now, there was no further thought.  Suddenly quite outside of her own volition, with no thought that she was going to do such a thing, her bosom began to heave, her throat contracted in four or five short, sharp, aching spasms, her eyes burned, and she shook in a vigorous, anguished, desperate, almost one might have said dry-eyed, cry, so hot and few were the tears.  She could not stop for the moment, just stood there and shook, and then after a while a dull ache succeeded, and she was quite as she had been before.

“Why cry?” she suddenly asked herself, fiercely—­for her.  “Why break down in this stormy, useless way?  Would it help?”

But, in spite of her speculative, philosophic observations to herself, she still felt the echo, the distant rumble, as it were, of the storm in her own soul.  “Why cry?  Why not cry?” She might have said—­but wouldn’t, and in spite of herself and all her logic, she knew that this tempest which had so recently raged over her was now merely circling around her soul’s horizon and would return to break again.

Chapter L

The arrival of Steger with the information that no move of any kind would be made by the sheriff until Monday morning, when Cowperwood could present himself, eased matters.  This gave him time to think—­to adjust home details at his leisure.  He broke the news to his father and mother in a consoling way and talked with his brothers and father about getting matters immediately adjusted in connection with the smaller houses to which they were now shortly to be compelled to move.  There was much conferring among the different members of this collapsing organization in regard to the minor details; and what with his conferences with Steger, his seeing personally Davison, Leigh, Avery Stone, of Jay Cooke & Co., George Waterman (his old-time employer Henry was dead), ex-State Treasurer Van Nostrand, who had gone out with the last State administration, and others, he was very busy.  Now that he was really going into prison, he wanted his financial friends to get together and see if they could get him out by appealing to the Governor.  The division of opinion among the judges of the State Supreme Court was his excuse and strong point.  He wanted Steger to follow this up, and he spared no pains in trying to see all and sundry who might be of use to him—­Edward Tighe, of Tighe & Co., who was still in business in Third Street; Newton Targool; Arthur Rivers; Joseph Zimmerman, the dry-goods prince, now a millionaire; Judge Kitchen; Terrence Relihan, the former representative of the money element at Harrisburg; and many others.