needed some one more like herself, some one with youth and beauty and force—­her, no less.  She clung to him now in ecstatic embraces until it was time to go.  So far as a plan of procedure could have been adjusted in a situation so incapable of accurate adjustment, it had been done.  She was desperately downcast at the last moment, as was he, over their parting; but she pulled herself together with her usual force and faced the dark future with a steady eye.

Chapter LI

Monday came and with it his final departure.  All that could be done had been done.  Cowperwood said his farewells to his mother and father, his brothers and sister.  He had a rather distant but sensible and matter-of-fact talk with his wife.  He made no special point of saying good-by to his son or his daughter; when he came in on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings, after he had learned that he was to depart Monday, it was with the thought of talking to them a little in an especially affectionate way.  He realized that his general moral or unmoral attitude was perhaps working them a temporary injustice.  Still he was not sure.  Most people did fairly well with their lives, whether coddled or deprived of opportunity.  These children would probably do as well as most children, whatever happened—­and then, anyhow, he had no intention of forsaking them financially, if he could help it.  He did not want to separate his wife from her children, nor them from her.  She should keep them.  He wanted them to be comfortable with her.  He would like to see them, wherever they were with her, occasionally.  Only he wanted his own personal freedom, in so far as she and they were concerned, to go off and set up a new world and a new home with Aileen.  So now on these last days, and particularly this last Sunday night, he was rather noticeably considerate of his boy and girl, without being too openly indicative of his approaching separation from them.

“Frank,” he said to his notably lackadaisical son on this occasion, “aren’t you going to straighten up and be a big, strong, healthy fellow?  You don’t play enough.  You ought to get in with a gang of boys and be a leader.  Why don’t you fit yourself up a gymnasium somewhere and see how strong you can get?”

They were in the senior Cowperwood’s sitting-room, where they had all rather consciously gathered on this occasion.

Lillian, second, who was on the other side of the big library table from her father, paused to survey him and her brother with interest.  Both had been carefully guarded against any real knowledge of their father’s affairs or his present predicament.  He was going away on a journey for about a month or so they understood.  Lillian was reading in a Chatterbox book which had been given her the previous Christmas.

“He won’t do anything,” she volunteered, looking up from her reading in a peculiarly critical way for her.  “Why, he won’t ever run races with me when I want him to.”