in which Lucetta began to
hope that the talkative fit had passed, Prime broke out again--this time
waxing eloquent over his struggles in New York as a beginner in the
writing trade. Here there were revelations to make her sorry that she
was obliged to listen; for years, it seemed, the fight had gone
discouragingly hard with him; there had been times when he had had to
choose between giving up in defeat or going hungry.

Lucetta pieced together a pitiful little story of this starving time.
Some one--once Prime called the some one Grider, and later gave him
another name--had tempted the struggler with an offer of a comfortable
income, the single condition precedent being an abandonment of the
literary fight. Prime's mutterings made the outcome plain for the
listener on the opposite side of the camp-fire: "No, I couldn't sell
soap; it's honest enough, no doubt--and decent enough--everybody ought
to use soap. But I've set my hand to the plough--no, that isn't it....
Oh, dammit, Peter, you know what I mean; I can't turn back; that is the
one thing I've never learned how to do. No, and I can't take your money
as a loan; that would be only another way of confessing defeat. No, by
George, I won't go out to dinner with you, either!"

Lucetta wept a little in sheer sympathy. Her own experience had not been
too easy. Left an orphan while she was still too young to teach, she
knew what it meant to set the heart upon a definite end and to strive
through thick and thin to reach it. She was relieved when Prime began to
talk less coherently of other incidents in his life in the great
metropolis. There were more references to Grider, and at last something
that figured as Prime's part in a talk with the barbarian. "Yes, by
Jove, Watson, the scoundrels tried to pull my leg; actually advertised
for me in the _Herald_. No, of course, I didn't fall for it. I know
perfectly well what it was ... same old gag about the English estate
with no resident heirs in sight. No, the ad. didn't say so, but I know.
What's that?--I'm a liar? Like Zeke I am!"

There were more of the vaporings, but neither these nor the young
woman's anxiety about the wounded man's condition were disturbing
enough at the last to keep her eyelids from drooping and her senses from
fluttering over the brink of the sleep abyss. Once she bestirred herself
to put more fuel on the fire, but after that the breeze blew the
mosquitoes away, the warmth from the upleaping blaze added