before he gave her the parting kiss he finished the conversation--

"What should be perfectly clear to us," he said, "is the fact that there
is no going back. Where could we begin life afresh? We are in now for
all that there is in us."

He bent over her upturned face very tenderly and a little remorsefully.
Charles Gould was competent because he had no illusions. The Gould
Concession had to fight for life with such weapons as could be found at
once in the mire of a corruption that was so universal as almost to lose
its significance. He was prepared to stoop for his weapons. For a moment
he felt as if the silver mine, which had killed his father, had decoyed
him further than he meant to go; and with the roundabout logic of
emotions, he felt that the worthiness of his life was bound up with
success. There was no going back.



CHAPTER SEVEN

Mrs. Gould was too intelligently sympathetic not to share that feeling.
It made life exciting, and she was too much of a woman not to like
excitement. But it frightened her, too, a little; and when Don Jose
Avellanos, rocking in the American chair, would go so far as to say,
"Even, my dear Carlos, if you had failed; even if some untoward event
were yet to destroy your work--which God forbid!--you would have
deserved well of your country," Mrs. Gould would look up from the
tea-table profoundly at her unmoved husband stirring the spoon in the
cup as though he had not heard a word.