th you. Then you do like him?"

"What has that got to do with it, Basil?"

"Nothing! nothing! That is, he was boring away about that scheme of his
again. He's got it into definite shape at last."

"What shape?"

March outlined it for her, and his wife seized its main features with
the intuitive sense of affairs which makes women such good business-men
when they will let it.

"It sounds perfectly crazy," she said, finally. "But it mayn't be. The
only thing I didn't like about Mr. Fulkerson was his always wanting to
chance things. But what have you got to do with it?"

"What have I got to do with it?" March toyed with the delay the question
gave him; then he said, with a sort of deprecatory laugh: "It seems
that Fulkerson has had his eye on me ever since we met that night on the
Quebec boat. I opened up pretty freely to him, as you do to a man you
never expect to see again, and when I found he was in that newspaper
syndicate business I told him about my early literary ambitions--"

"You can't say that I ever discouraged them, Basil," his wife put in. "I
should have been willing, any time, to give up everything for them."

"Well, he says that I first suggested this brilliant idea to him.
Perhaps I did; I don't remember. When he told me about his supplying
literature to newspapers for simultaneous publication, he says I asked:
'Why not apply the principle of co-operation to a magazine, and run it
in the interest of the contributors?' and that set him to thinking, and
he thought out his plan of a periodical which should pay authors and
artists a low price outright for their work and give them a chance of
the profits in the way of a percentage. After all, it isn't so very
different from the chances an author takes when he publishes a book.
And Fulkerson thinks that the novelty of the thing would pique public
curiosity, if it didn't arouse public sympathy. And the long and short
of it is, Isabel, that he wants me to help edit it."

"To edit it?" His wife caught her breath, and she took a little time to
realize the fact, while she stared hard at her husband to make sure he
was not joking.

"Yes. He says he owes it all to me; that I invented the idea--the
germ--the microbe."

His wife had now realized the fact, at least in a degree that excluded
trifling with it. "That is very honorable of Mr. Fulkerson; and if he
owes it to you, it was the least he could do." Having recognized her
husband's claim to the honor done