“Well, by-by, Sarah.  You’ll feel better about it.”

Then Mr. Belcher stooped and kissed her forehead, and left her.

That little attention—­that one shadow of recognition of the old relations, that faint show of feeling—­went straight to her starving heart.  And then, assuming blame for what seemed, at the moment of reaction, her unreasonable selfishness, she determined to say no more, and to take uncomplainingly whatever life her husband might provide for her.

As for Mr. Belcher, he went off to his library and his cigar with a wound in his heart.  The interview with his wife, while it had excited in him a certain amount of pity for her, had deepened his pity for himself.  She had ceased to be what she had once been to him; yet his experience in the city had proved that there were still women in the world who could excite in him the old passion, and move him to the old gallantries.  It was clearly a case of incipient “incompatibility.”  It was “the mistake of a lifetime” just discovered, though she had borne his children and held his respect for fifteen years.  He still felt the warmth of Mrs. Dillingham’s hands within his own, the impression of her confiding clasp upon his arm, and the magnetic influence of her splendid presence.  Reason as he would, he felt defrauded of his rights; and he wondered whether any combination of circumstances would ever permit him to achieve them.  As this amounted to wondering whether Mrs. Belcher would die, he strove to banish the question from his mind; but it returned and returned again so pertinaciously that he was glad to order his horses and ride to his factory.

Before night it became noised through the village that the great proprietor had been to the oil regions.  The fact was talked over among the people in the shops, in the street, in social groups that gathered at evening; and there was great curiosity to know what he had learned, and what opinions he had formed.  Mr. Belcher knew how to play his cards, and having set the people talking, he filled out and sent to each of the wives of the five pastors of the village, as a gift, a certificate of five shares of the stock of the Continental Petroleum Company.  Of course, they were greatly delighted, and, of course, twenty-four hours had not passed by when every man, woman and child in Sevenoaks was acquainted with the transaction.  People began to revise their judgments of the man whom they had so severely condemned.  After all, it was the way in which he had done things in former days, and though they had come to a vivid apprehension of the fact that he had done them for a purpose, which invariably terminated in himself, they could not see what there was to be gained by so munificent a gift.  Was he not endeavoring, by self-sacrifice, to win back a portion of the consideration he had formerly enjoyed?  Was it not a confession of wrong-doing, or wrong judgment?  There were men who shook their heads, and “didn’t know about it;” but the preponderance of feeling was on the side of the proprietor, who sat in his library and imagined just what was in progress around him,—­nay, calculated upon it, as a chemist calculates the results of certain combinations in his laboratory.  He knew the people a great deal better than they knew him, or even themselves.