McTeague went out, closing the door.  Trina stood for a moment looking intently at the bricks at her feet.  Then she returned to the table, and sat down again before the notice, and, resting her head in both her fists, read it yet another time.  Suddenly the conviction seized upon her that it was all true.  McTeague would be obliged to stop work, no matter how good a dentist he was.  But why had the authorities at the City Hall waited this long before serving the notice?  All at once Trina snapped her fingers, with a quick flash of intelligence.

“It’s Marcus that’s done it,” she cried.

* * * * *

It was like a clap of thunder.  McTeague was stunned, stupefied.  He said nothing.  Never in his life had he been so taciturn.  At times he did not seem to hear Trina when she spoke to him, and often she had to shake him by the shoulder to arouse his attention.  He would sit apart in his “Parlors,” turning the notice about in his enormous clumsy fingers, reading it stupidly over and over again.  He couldn’t understand.  What had a clerk at the City Hall to do with him?  Why couldn’t they let him alone?

“Oh, what’s to become of us now?” wailed Trina.  “What’s to become of us now?  We’re paupers, beggars—­and all so sudden.”  And once, in a quick, inexplicable fury, totally unlike anything that McTeague had noticed in her before, she had started up, with fists and teeth shut tight, and had cried, “Oh, if you’d only killed Marcus Schouler that time he fought you!”

McTeague had continued his work, acting from sheer force of habit; his sluggish, deliberate nature, methodical, obstinate, refusing to adapt itself to the new conditions.

“Maybe Marcus was only trying to scare us,” Trina had said.  “How are they going to know whether you’re practising or not?”

“I got a mould to make to-morrow,” McTeague said, “and Vanovitch, that plumber round on Sutter Street, he’s coming again at three.”

“Well, you go right ahead,” Trina told him, decisively; “you go right ahead and make the mould, and pull every tooth in Vanovitch’s head if you want to.  Who’s going to know?  Maybe they just sent that notice as a matter of form.  Maybe Marcus got that paper and filled it in himself.”

The two would lie awake all night long, staring up into the dark, talking, talking, talking.

“Haven’t you got any right to practise if you’ve not been to a dental college, Mac?  Didn’t you ever go?” Trina would ask again and again.

“No, no,” answered the dentist, “I never went.  I learnt from the fellow I was apprenticed to.  I don’ know anything about a dental college.  Ain’t I got a right to do as I like?” he suddenly exclaimed.

“If you know your profession, isn’t that enough?” cried Trina.

“Sure, sure,” growled McTeague.  “I ain’t going to stop for them.”

“You go right on,” Trina said, “and I bet you won’t hear another word about it.”