away from him, and
moved toward the door of their chamber. He could not help looking back
at the eyes that followed him, and then he could not bear their look.
"I--I suppose a man mustn't trust too much," he said.

"Can he?" asked Mary, leaning against a table.

"Oh, yes, he can," replied John; but his tone lacked conviction.

"If it's the right kind?"

Her eyes were full of tears.

"I'm afraid mine's not the right kind, then," said John, and passed out
into and down the street.

But what a mind he took with him--what torture of questions! Was he
being lifted or pulled down? His tastes,--were they rising or sinking?
Were little negligences of dress and bearing and in-door attitude
creeping into his habits? Was he losing his discriminative sense of
quantity, time, distance? Did he talk of small achievements, small
gains, and small truths, as though they were great? Had he learned to
carp at the rich, and to make honesty the excuse for all penury? Had he
these various poverty-marks? He looked at himself outside and inside,
and feared to answer. One thing he knew,--that he was having great
wrestlings.

He turned his thoughts to Ristofalo. This was a common habit with him.
Not only in thought, but in person, he hovered with a positive
infatuation about this man of perpetual success.

Lately the Italian had gone out of town, into the country of La
Fourche, to buy standing crops of oranges. Richling fed his hope on the
possibilities that might follow Ristofalo's return. His friend would
want him to superintend the gathering and shipment of those crops--when
they should be ripe--away yonder in November. Frantic thought! A man and
his wife could starve to death twenty times before then.

Mrs. Riley's high esteem for John and Mary had risen from the date of
the Doctor's visit, and the good woman thought it but right somewhat to
increase the figures of their room-rent to others more in keeping with
such high gentility. How fast the little hoard melted away!

And the summer continued on,--the long, beautiful, glaring, implacable
summer; its heat quaking on the low roofs; its fig-trees dropping their
shrivelled and blackened leaves and writhing their weird, bare branches
under the scorching sun; the long-drawn, frying note of its cicada
throbbing through the mid-day heat from the depths of the becalmed oak;
its universal pall of dust on the myriad red, sleep-heavy blossoms of
the oleander and the white tulips of the lo