w how you have to work. But go on. I don't mind, I know."

"Oh, Ruby, how you talk. I can't always be here."

"I know what it is, Eugene," she replied. "You don't care any more. Oh,
well, don't mind me."

"Now, sweet, don't talk like that," he would say, but after he was gone
she would stand by her window and look out upon the shabby neighborhood
and sigh sadly. He was more to her than anyone she had met yet, but she
was not the kind that cried.

"He is going to leave me," was her one thought. "He is going to leave
me."

Goldfarb had watched Eugene a long time, was interested in him, realized
that he had talent. He was leaving shortly to take a better
Sunday-Editorship himself on a larger paper, and he thought Eugene was
wasting his time and ought to be told so.

"I think you ought to try to get on one of the bigger papers here,
Witla," he said to him one Saturday afternoon when things were closing
up. "You'll never amount to anything on this paper. It isn't big enough.
You ought to get on one of the big ones. Why don't you try the
_Tribune_--or else go to New York? I think you ought to do magazine
work."

Eugene drank it all in. "I've been thinking of that," he said. "I think
I'll go to New York. I'll be better off there."

"I would either do one or the other. If you stay too long in a place
like this it's apt to do you harm."

Eugene went back to his desk with the thought of change ringing in his
ears. He would go. He would save up his money until he had one hundred
and fifty or two hundred dollars and then try his luck in the East. He
would leave Ruby and Angela, the latter only temporarily, the former for
good very likely, though he only vaguely confessed this to himself. He
would make some money and then he would come back and marry his dream
from Blackwood. Already his imaginative mind ran forward to a poetic
wedding in a little country church, with Angela standing beside him in
white. Then he would bring her back with him to New York--he, Eugene
Witla, already famous in the East. Already the lure of the big eastern
city was in his mind, its palaces, its wealth, its fame. It was the
great world he knew, this side of Paris and London. He would go to it
now, shortly. What would he be there? How great? How soon?

So he dreamed.

CHAPTER XIV

Once this idea of New York was fixed in his mind as a necessary step in
his career, it was no trouble for him to carry it out. He had already
put aside si