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then dropped his eyes without saying more. Whether Fulkerson had not thought it so much or not, he said: "Well, Ill give you thirty-five hundred. Come! And your chances in the success." "We wont count the chances in the success. And I dont believe thirty-five hundred would go any further in New York than three thousand in Boston." "But you dont live on three thousand here?" "No; my wife has a little property." "Well, she wont lose the income if you go to New York. I suppose you pay ten or twelve hundred a year for your house here. You can get plenty of flats in New York for the same money; and I understand you can get all sorts of provisions for less than you pay now--three or four cents on the pound. Come!" This was by no means the first talk they had had about the matter; every three or four months during the past two years the syndicate man had dropped in upon March to air the scheme and to get his impressions of it. This had happened so often that it had come to be a sort of joke between them. But now Fulkerson clearly meant business, and March had a struggle to maintain himself in a firm poise of refusal. "I dare say it wouldnt--or it neednt-cost so very much more, but I dont want to go to New York; or my wife doesnt. Its the same thing." "A good deal samer," Fulkerson admitted. March did not quite like his candor, and he went on with dignity. "Its very natural she shouldnt. She has always lived in Boston; shes attached to the place. Now, if you were going to start The Fifth Wheel in Boston--" Fulkerson slowly and sadly shook his head, but decidedly. "Wouldnt do. You might as well say St. Louis or Cincinnati. Theres only one city that belongs to the whole country, and thats New York." "Yes, I know," sighed March; "and Boston belongs to the Bostonians, but they like you to make yourself at home while youre visiting." "If youll agree to make phrases like that, right along, and get them into The Round-Robin somehow, Ill say four thousand," said Fulkerson. "You think it over now, March. You talk it over with Mrs. March; I know you will, anyway; and I might as well make a virtue of advising you to do it. Tell her I advised you to do it, and you let me know before next Saturday what youve decided." March shut down the rolling top of his desk in the corner of the room, and walked Fulkerson out before him. It was so late that the last of the chore-women who washed down the marble halls and stairs of the great building had wrung out her floor-cloth and departed, leaving spotless stone and a clean, damp smell in the darkening corridors behind her. "Couldnt offer you such swell quarters in New York, March," Fulkerson said, as he went tack-tacking down the steps with his small boot-heels. "But Ive got my eye on a little house round in West Eleventh Street that Im going to fit up for my bachelors hall in the third story, and adapt for The Lone Hand in the first and second, if this thing goes through; and I guess well be pretty comfortable. Its right on the Sand Strip--no malaria of any kind." "I dont know that Im going to share its salubrity with you yet," March sighed, in an obvious travail which gave Fulkerson hopes. "Oh yes, you are," he coaxed. "Now, you talk it over with your wife. You give her a fair, unprejudiced chance at the thing on its merits, and Im very much mistaken in Mrs. March if she doesnt tell you to go in and win. Were bound to win!" They stood on the outside steps of the vast edifice beetling like a granite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory of life-insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absently lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years familiarity, and so was the well-known street in its Saturday-evening solitude. He asked himself, with prophetic homesickness, if it were an omen of what was to be. But he only said, musingly: "A fortnightly. You know that didnt work in England. The fortnightly is published once a month now." "It works in France," Fulkerson retorted. "The Revue des Deux Mondes is still published twice a month. I guess we can make it work in America--with illustrations." "Going to have illustrations?" "My

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