Читать книгу The Transgressors - Francis Alexandre Adams - Страница 13

"Sing me of love and dear days gone;

Sing me of joys that are fled;

Strike no chord of the now forlorn;

None of the future dread,

Ah, let thy music ring with tone

That speaks the budding year;

The Winter's blast too soon will moan

Through the forest bleak and drear.

Then sing but a line from the dear old days

We sang 'neath the moon's soft beams,

When we were young, in those gladsome days,

While we sailed on the sea of dreams.

There are no songs that reach the heart,

Like those sung long ago.

New singers and their songs depart;

The old ones ne'er shall go.

Nor is it strange that they should be

As balm to the sad heart;

They tell of love when it was young,

And all its joys impart."

At eleven o'clock Trueman leaves the Purdy mansion and goes to his hotel. To him it is clear that an irreparable breach has been made in the relations between himself and Gorman Purdy. He knows the unrelenting character of the President of the Paradise Coal Company.

"It was a question of right and wrong," he muses. "I could not see a woman and her child thrown out in the highway, when I knew that it was through my skill as a lawyer that just damages were kept from them. The law was on the side of the company; but justice was certainly on the side of the widow.

"Every day I have some nasty work of this kind to perform. It is making a heartless wretch of me. A man can make money sometimes that comes too dear."

The next day, at the office, Purdy and Trueman have a long talk. It results in Trueman withdrawing his objections to the assembling of the Coal and Iron Police. As to the widow, a compromise is effected. She is to be set up in business in a neighboring town where her case is unknown.

The thought that to break with Purely would mean to lose Ethel, turns Harvey's decision when the moment comes to choose between duty and policy.

The work of preparing to defeat the pending strike is at once taken up,

Purdy and Trueman working in perfect accord.