re! I'm going round to see Mrs. March with you, and explain the thing
to her. I know Mrs. March! She wouldn't believe you knew what you were
going in for. She has a great respect for your mind, but she don't think
you've got any sense. Heigh?"

"All right," said March, glad of the notion; and it was really a comfort
to have Fulkerson with him to develop all the points; and it was
delightful to see how clearly and quickly she seized them; it made March
proud of her. She was only angry that they had lost any time in coming to
submit so plain a case to her.

Mr. Dryfoos might change his mind in the night, and then everything would
be lost. They must go to him instantly, and tell him that they accepted;
they must telegraph him.

"Might as well send a district messenger; he'd get there next week," said
Fulkerson. "No, no! It 'll all keep till to-morrow, and be the better for
it. If he's got this fancy for March, as I say, he ain't agoing to change
it in a single night. People don't change their fancies for March in a
lifetime. Heigh?"

When Fulkerson turned up very early at the office next morning, as March
did, he was less strenuous about Dryfoos's fancy for March. It was as if
Miss Woodburn might have blown cold upon that theory, as something unjust
to his own merit, for which she would naturally be more jealous than he.

March told him what he had forgotten to tell him the day before, though
he had been trying, all through their excited talk, to get it in, that
the Dryfooses were going abroad.

"Oh, ho!" cried Fulkerson. "That's the milk in the cocoanut, is it? Well,
I thought there must be something."

But this fact had not changed Mrs. March at all in her conviction that it
was Mr. Dryfoos's fancy for her husband which had moved him to make him
this extraordinary offer, and she reminded him that it had first been
made to him, without regard to Fulkerson. "And perhaps," she went on,
"Mr. Dryfoos has been changed---softened; and doesn't find money all in
all any more. He's had enough to change him, poor old man!"

"Does anything from without change us?" her husband mused aloud. "We're
brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of
people's thinking, nowadays. But I doubt it, especially if the thing
outside is some great event, something cataclysmal, like this tremendous
sorrow of Dryfoos's."

"Then what is it that changes us?" demanded his wife, almost angry with
him for his heresy.

"W