him."

"Lindau does himself injustice when he gets to talking in that way,"
said March. "I hate to hear him. He's as good an American as any of us;
and it's only because he has too high an ideal of us--"

"Oh, go on! Rub it in--rub it in!" cried Fulkerson, clutching his hair
in suffering, which was not altogether burlesque. "How did I know he had
renounced his 'bension'? Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't know it myself. I only knew that he had none, and I didn't
ask, for I had a notion that it might be a painful subject."

Fulkerson tried to turn it off lightly. "Well, he's a noble old fellow;
pity he drinks." March would not smile, and Fulkerson broke out: "Dog on
it! I'll make it up to the old fool the next time he comes. I don't
like that dynamite talk of his; but any man that's given his hand to the
country has got mine in his grip for good. Why, March! You don't suppose
I wanted to hurt his feelings, do you?"

"Why, of course not, Fulkerson."

But they could not get away from a certain ruefulness for that time, and
in the evening Fulkerson came round to March's to say that he had got
Lindau's address from Conrad, and had looked him up at his lodgings.

"Well, there isn't so much bric-a-brac there, quite, as Mrs. Green left
you; but I've made it all right with Lindau, as far as I'm concerned.
I told him I didn't know when I spoke that way, and I honored him for
sticking to his 'brinciples'; I don't believe in his 'brincibles'; and
we wept on each other's necks--at least, he did. Dogged if he didn't
kiss me before I knew what he was up to. He said I was his chenerous
gong friendt, and he begged my barton if he had said anything to wound
me. I tell you it was an affecting scene, March; and rats enough round
in that old barracks where he lives to fit out a first-class case of
delirium tremens. What does he stay there for? He's not obliged to?"

Lindau's reasons, as March repeated them, affected Fulkerson as
deliciously comical; but after that he confined his pleasantries at the
office to Beaton and Conrad Dryfoos, or, as he said, he spent the rest
of the summer in keeping Lindau smoothed up.

It is doubtful if Lindau altogether liked this as well. Perhaps he
missed the occasions Fulkerson used to give him of bursting out against
the millionaires; and he could not well go on denouncing as the slafe
of gabidal a man who had behaved to him as Fulkerson had done, though
Fulkerson's servile relations to capital