him,
I said he'd probably find you here this morning. But if you don't want to
see him, I can put him off till afternoon, I suppose."

He tossed the card to his father, who looked at it quietly, and then gave
it to his wife. "Perhaps I'd as well see him?"

"See him!" she returned in accents in which all the intensity of her soul
was centred. By an effort of self-control which no words can convey a
just sense of she remained with her children, while her husband with a
laugh more teasing than can be imagined went into the drawing-room to
meet Burnamy.

The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summer as to clothes, and he
looked not merely haggard but shabby. He made an effort for dignity as
well as gayety, however, in stating himself to March, with many apologies
for his persistency. But, he said, he was on his way West, and he was
anxious to know whether there was any chance of his 'Kasper Hauler' paper
being taken if he finished it up. 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