ving about for some time
and had begun to wonder what he was doing. She came in, quietly shutting
the door behind her.

McTeague had tidied the room with the greatest care. The volumes of the
"Practical Dentist" and the "American System of Dentistry" were piled
upon the marble-top centre-table in rectangular blocks. The few chairs
were drawn up against the wall under the steel engraving of "Lorenzo
de' Medici" with more than usual precision. The dental engine and the
nickelled trimmings of the operating chair had been furbished till they
shone, while on the movable rack in the bay window McTeague had arranged
his instruments with the greatest neatness and regularity. "Hoe"
excavators, pluggers, forceps, pliers, corundum disks and burrs, even
the boxwood mallet that Trina was never to use again, all were laid out
and ready for immediate use.

McTeague himself sat in his operating chair, looking stupidly out of the
windows, across the roofs opposite, with an unseeing gaze, his red hands
lying idly in his lap. Trina came up to him. There was something in his
eyes that made her put both arms around his neck and lay his huge head
with its coarse blond hair upon her shoulder.

"I--I got everything fixed," he said. "I got everything fixed an' ready.
See, everything ready an' waiting, an'--an'--an' nobody comes, an'
nobody's ever going to come any more. Oh, Trina!" He put his arms about
her and drew her down closer to him.

"Never mind, dear; never mind," cried Trina, through her tears. "It'll
all come right in the end, and we'll be poor together if we have to. You
can sure find something else to do. We'll start in again."

"Look at the slate there," said McTeague, pulling away from her and
reaching down the slate on which he kept a record of his appointments.
"Look at them. There's Vanovitch at two on Wednesday, and Loughhead's
wife Thursday morning, and Heise's little girl Thursday afternoon at
one-thirty; Mrs. Watson on Friday, and Vanovitch again Saturday morning
early--at seven. That's what I was to have had, and they ain't going to
come. They ain't ever going to come any more."

Trina took the little slate from him and looked at it ruefully.

"Rub them out," she said, her voice trembling; "rub it all out;" and as
she spoke her eyes brimmed again, and a great tear dropped on the slate.
"That's it," she said; "that's the way to rub it out, by me crying
on it." Then she passed her fingers over the tear-blurred writing