"There isn't anybody else," agonized Old Two Blades, with a wail in his voice.
But for Henry this thing had reached its limit. Nerves frazzled, tears of vexation springing to his eyes, banging the table with his hand, he cried: "Damn it, what if there isn't? . . . This place is torture to me. Torture! Do you understand. I'm going to get out of it—tomorrow—today—now! Ditch the whole thing!"
Despite the frenzy of this announcement, there was a ring of unalterable conviction in the words and in the manner, from which Old Two Blades stood back appalled. That this young man should fail them, prove a deserter, refuse himself to him—to Edgewater! Well—if Henry Harrington was going to collapse, what was there left? Who was there left?
The Boland chin was trembling. This seemed the last, the crowning calamity to Old Two Blades—greater than the upsetting of his fortune, the burning of his mills, the destruction of the town. Why, they had all, all of them, come to believe in these last forty-eight hours that Henry Harrington was a sort of human rock who could not crumble.
The spectacle of him weakening, threatening to run away, affected Boland strangely. As he looked at this disheveled, distraught young man so innocently ruined, he fancied he saw a picture of himself. He wondered if he too had not been innocently ruined. It raised the whole question. It sent him like a Napoleon groping back over the plan of his Waterloo to see why and wherein he had lost the battle. As of a comrade in catastrophe, he asked: "Why did it have to happen, Harrington—all—all of this?"
