tocks we have two thousand a year,
anyway, and we could pinch through on that till you got into some other
business afterward, especially if we'd saved something out of your
salary while it lasted. Basil, I want you to try it! I know it will give
you a new lease of life to have a congenial occupation." March laughed,
but his wife persisted. "I'm all for your trying it, Basil; indeed I am.
If it's an experiment, you can give it up."

"It can give me up, too."

"Oh, nonsense! I guess there's not much fear of that. Now, I want you to
telegraph Mr. Fulkerson, so that he'll find the despatch waiting for him
when he gets to New York. I'll take the whole responsibility, Basil, and
I'll risk all the consequences."

III.

March's face had sobered more and more as she followed one hopeful burst
with another, and now it expressed a positive pain. But he forced a
smile and said: "There's a little condition attached. Where did you
suppose it was to be published?"

"Why, in Boston, of course. Where else should it be published?"

She looked at him for the intention of his question so searchingly that
he quite gave up the attempt to be gay about it. "No," he said, gravely,
"it's to be published in New York."

She fell back in her chair. "In New York?" She leaned forward over the
table toward him, as if to make sure that she heard aright, and said,
with all the keen reproach that he could have expected: "In New York,
Basil! Oh, how could you have let me go on?"

He had a sufficiently rueful face in owning: "I oughtn't to have done
it, but I got started wrong. I couldn't help putting the best foot,
forward at first--or as long as the whole thing was in the air. I didn't
know that you would take so much to the general enterprise, or else I
should have mentioned the New York condition at once; but, of course,
that puts an end to it."

"Oh, of course," she assented, sadly. "We COULDN'T go to New York."

"No, I know that," he said; and with this a perverse desire to tempt her
to the impossibility awoke in him, though he was really quite cold about
the affair himself now. "Fulkerson thought we could get a nice flat
in New York for about what the interest and taxes came to here, and
provisions are cheaper. But I should rather not experiment at my time of
life. If I could have been caught younger, I might have been inured to
New York, but I don't believe I could stand it now."

"How I hate to have you talk that way, Basil! Yo