Christie, with suppressed emotion, going towards the opposite entrance.

Tears stood in each other's eyes with this terrible exchange of domestic
confidences. Nevertheless, after a moment's pause, they deliberately
turned again, and, facing each other with frightful calmness, left
the room by purposeless and deliberate exits other than those they
had contemplated--a crushing abnegation of self, that, to some extent,
relieved their surcharged feelings.

Meantime the material prosperity of Devil's Ford increased, if a
prosperity based upon no visible foundation but the confidences and
hopes of its inhabitants could be called material. Few, if any, stopped
to consider that the improvements, buildings, and business were simply
the outlay of capital brought from elsewhere, and as yet the settlement
or town, as it was now called, had neither produced nor exported capital
of itself equal to half the amount expended. It was true that some
land was cultivated on the further slope, some mills erected and lumber
furnished from the inexhaustible forest; but the consumers were the
inhabitants themselves, who paid for their produce in borrowed capital
or unlimited credit. It was never discovered that while all roads led to
Devil's Ford, Devil's Ford led to nowhere. The difficulties overcome
in getting things into the settlement were never surmounted for getting
things out of it. The lumber was practically valueless for export to
other settlements across the mountain roads, which were equally rich in
timber. The theory so enthusiastically held by the original locators,
that Devil's Ford was a vast sink that had, through ages, exhausted and
absorbed the trickling wealth of the adjacent hills and valleys, was
suffering an ironical corroboration.

One morning it was known that work was stopped at the Devil's Ford