p. March would have been a
far harder-hearted editor than he was, if he could have discouraged the
suppliant before him. He said he would take the Kasper Hauler paper and
add a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollars a thousand words.
Then Burnamy's dignity gave way, if not his gayety; he began to laugh,
and suddenly he broke down and confessed that he had come home in the
steerage; and was at his last cent, beyond his fare to Chicago. His
straw hat looked like a withered leaf in the light of his sad facts;
his thin overcoat affected March's imagination as something like the
diaphanous cast shell of a locust, hopelessly resumed for comfort at the
approach of autumn. He made Burnamy sit down, after he had once risen,
and he told him of Major Eltwin's wish to see him; and he promised to
go round with him to the major's hotel before the Eltwins left town that
afternoon.

While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs. March was kept from
breaking in upon them only by the psychical experiment which she was
making with the help and sympathy of her daughter at the window of the
dining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street. At the first hint she gave
of the emotional situation which Burnamy was a main part of, her
son; with the brutal contempt of young men for other young men's love
affairs, said he must go to the office; he bade his mother tell his
father there was no need of his coming down that day, and he left the
two women together. This gave the mother a chance to develop the whole
fact to the daughter with telegrammic rapidity and brevity, and then
to enrich the first-outline with innumerable details, while they both
remained at the window, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely intervals,
with no sense of iteration for either of them, "I told her to come
in the morning, if she felt like it, and I know she will. But if she
doesn't, I shall say there is nothing in fate, or Providence either. At
any rate I'm going to stay here and keep longing for her, and we'll see
whether there's anything in that silly theory of your father's. I don't
believe there is," she said, to be on the safe side.

Even when she saw Agatha Triscoe enter the park gate on Rutherford
Place, she saved herself from disappointment by declaring that she was
not coming across to their house. As the girl persisted in coming and
coming, and at last came so near that she caught sight of Mrs. March at
the window and nodded, the mother turned ungratefu