the table.

"Well, perhaps not to-morrow. I've got some of my things to put together
in Cambridge yet, and perhaps I'd better look after them. But I've
a notion I'd better spend the winter at home, and get an idea of the
manufacture before I go abroad. I might sail in January; they say it's a
good month."

"Yes, there's sense in that," said his father.

"And perhaps I won't break up in Cambridge till I've been to New York
and Philadelphia. What do you think? It's easier striking them from
here."

"I don't know but you're right," said his father easily.

They had come out of the dining-room, and Dan stopped to get some
cigarettes in the office. He looked mechanically at the theatre bills
over the cigar case. "I see Irving's at the 'Boston.'"

"Oh, you don't say!" said his father. "Let's go and see him."

"If you wish it, sir," said Dan, with pensive acquiescence. All the
Maverings were fond of the theatre, and made any mood the occasion or
the pretext of going to the play. If they were sad, they went; if they
were gay, they went. As long as Dan's mother could get out-of-doors she
used to have herself carried to a box in the theatre whenever she was in
town; now that she no longer left her room, she had a dominant passion
for hearing about actors and acting; it was almost a work of piety in
her husband and children to see them and report to her.

His father left him the next afternoon, and Dan, who had spent the
day with him looking into business for the first time, with a running
accompaniment of Alice in all the details, remained to uninterrupted
misery. He spent the evening in his room, too wretched even for the
theatre. It is true that he tried to find Boardman, but Boardman was
again off on some newspaper duty; and after trying at several houses
in the hope, which he knew was vain, of finding any one in town yet, he
shut himself up with his thoughts. They did not differ from the thoughts
of the night before, and the night before that, but they were calmer,
and they portended more distinctly a life of self-abnegation and
solitude from that time forth. He tested his feelings, and found that
it was not hurt vanity that he was suffering from: it was really wounded
affection. He did not resent Alice's cruelty; he wished that she might
be happy; he could endure to see her happy.

He wrote a letter to the married one of the two ladies he had spent the
day with in Portland, and thanked them for making pass pleasan