but the girl seemed to feel that her lord was bound upon some flaring triumph, and even at the station her face was wreathed in smiles.  Her blue eyes were brimming with excitement; she bubbled with hopeful, helpful advice; she patted her husband’s arm and hugged it to her.  “You’re going to win, boy.  You’re going to win,” she kept repeating.  For one moment only—­at the actual parting—­she clung to him wildly, with all her woman’s strength, then, as the warning cry sounded, she kissed him long and hungrily, and fairly thrust him aboard the Pullman.  He did not dream how she wilted and drooped the instant he had gone.

As the train pulled out he ran back to the observation car to wave a last farewell, and saw her clinging to the iron fence, sobbing wretchedly; a desolate, weak little girl-wife mastered by a thousand fears.  She was too blind with tears to see him.  The sight raised a lump in the young husband’s throat which lasted to Fort Wayne.

“Poor little thoroughbred,” he mused.  “I just can’t lose, that’s all.”

The lump was not entirely gone when the luncheon call came, so Mitchell dined upon it, reasoning that this kind of a beginning augured well for an economical trip.

Now that he was away from the warmth of his wife’s enthusiasm contemplation of his undertaking made the salesman rather sick.  If only he were traveling at the firm’s expense, if only he had something to fall back upon in case of failure, if only Comer & Mathison were behind him in any way, the complexion of things would have been altogether different.  But to set out for a foreign land with no backing whatever in the hope of accomplishing that which no American salesman had ever been able to accomplish, and to finance the undertaking out of his own pocket on a sum less than he would have expected for cigarette money—­well, it was an enterprise to test a fellow’s courage and to dampen the most youthful optimism.  His proposal to the firm to win all or lose all, he realized now, had been in the nature of a bluff, and the firm had called it.  There was nothing to do, therefore, but go through and win; there could be no turning back, for he had burned his bridges.

When one enters a race-horse in a contest he puts the animal in good condition, he grooms it, he feeds it the best the stable affords, he trains and exercises it carefully.  Mitchell had never owned a race-horse, but he reasoned that similar principles should apply to a human being under similar conditions.  He had entered a competition, therefore he decided to condition himself physically and mentally for the race.  A doped pony cannot run, neither can a worried salesman sell goods.

In line with this decision, he took one of the best state-rooms on the Lucania, and denied himself nothing that the ship afforded.  Every morning he took his exercise, every evening a rub-down.  He trained like a fighter, and when he landed he was fit; his muscles were hard, his stomach strong, his brain clear.  He went first-class from Liverpool to London; he put up at the Metropole in luxurious quarters.  When he stopped to think about that nine hundred and twenty, already amazingly shrunken, he argued bravely that what he had spent had gone to buy condition powders.