fe had come to let him in when he flung it
open. "Why, Basil," she said, "what's brought you back? Are you sick?
You're all pale. Well, no wonder! This is the last of Mr. Fulkerson's
dinners you shall go to. You're not strong enough for it, and your
stomach will be all out of order for a week. How hot you are! and in a
drip of perspiration! Now you'll be sick." She took his hat away, which
hung dangling in his hand, and pushed him into a chair with tender
impatience. "What is the matter? Has anything happened?"

"Everything has happened," he said, getting his voice after one or two
husky endeavors for it; and then he poured out a confused and huddled
statement of the case, from which she only got at the situation by
prolonged cross-questioning.

At the end she said, "I knew Lindau would get you into trouble."

This cut March to the heart. "Isabel!" he cried, reproachfully.

"Oh, I know," she retorted, and the tears began to come. "I don't wonder
you didn't want to say much to me about that dinner at breakfast. I
noticed it; but I thought you were just dull, and so I didn't insist. I
wish I had, now. If you had told me what Lindau had said, I should have
known what would have come of it, and I could have advised you--"

"Would you have advised me," March demanded, curiously, "to submit to
bullying like that, and meekly consent to commit an act of cruelty
against a man who had once been such a friend to me?"

"It was an unlucky day when you met him. I suppose we shall have to go.
And just when we bad got used to New York, and begun to like it. I don't
know where we shall go now; Boston isn't like home any more; and we
couldn't live on two thousand there; I should be ashamed to try. I'm sure
I don't know where we can live on it. I suppose in some country village,
where there are no schools, or anything for the children. I don't know
what they'll say when we tell them, poor things."

Every word was a stab in March's heart, so weakly tender to his own; his
wife's tears, after so much experience of the comparative lightness of
the griefs that weep themselves out in women, always seemed wrung from
his own soul; if his children suffered in the least through him, he felt
like a murderer. It was far worse than he could have imagined, the way
his wife took the affair, though he had imagined certain words, or
perhaps only looks, from her that were bad enough. He had allowed for
trouble, but trouble on his account: a svmpathy