“What do you mean, Mac?” cried Trina, apprehensively.

“Well, we can live on that money until—­until—­until—­” he broke off with an uncertain movement of his shoulders, looking about him stupidly.

“Until when?” cried Trina.  “There ain’t ever going to be any ‘until.’  We’ve got the interest of that five thousand and we’ve got what Uncle Oelbermann gives me, a little over thirty dollars a month, and that’s all we’ve got.  You’ll have to find something else to do.”

“What will I find to do?”

What, indeed?  McTeague was over thirty now, sluggish and slow-witted at best.  What new trade could he learn at this age?

Little by little Trina made the dentist understand the calamity that had befallen them, and McTeague at last began cancelling his appointments.  Trina gave it out that he was sick.

“Not a soul need know what’s happened to us,” she said to her husband.

But it was only by slow degrees that McTeague abandoned his profession.  Every morning after breakfast he would go into his “Parlors” as usual and potter about his instruments, his dental engine, and his washstand in the corner behind his screen where he made his moulds.  Now he would sharpen a “hoe” excavator, now he would busy himself for a whole hour making “mats” and “cylinders.”  Then he would look over his slate where he kept a record of his appointments.

One day Trina softly opened the door of the “Parlors” and came in from the sitting-room.  She had not heard McTeague moving about for some time and had begun to wonder what he was doing.  She came in, quietly shutting the door behind her.

McTeague had tidied the room with the greatest care.  The volumes of the “Practical Dentist” and the “American System of Dentistry” were piled upon the marble-top centre-table in rectangular blocks.  The few chairs were drawn up against the wall under the steel engraving of “Lorenzo de’ Medici” with more than usual precision.  The dental engine and the nickelled trimmings of the operating chair had been furbished till they shone, while on the movable rack in the bay window McTeague had arranged his instruments with the greatest neatness and regularity.  “Hoe” excavators, pluggers, forceps, pliers, corundum disks and burrs, even the boxwood mallet that Trina was never to use again, all were laid out and ready for immediate use.

McTeague himself sat in his operating chair, looking stupidly out of the windows, across the roofs opposite, with an unseeing gaze, his red hands lying idly in his lap.  Trina came up to him.  There was something in his eyes that made her put both arms around his neck and lay his huge head with its coarse blond hair upon her shoulder.

“I—­I got everything fixed,” he said.  “I got everything fixed an’ ready.  See, everything ready an’ waiting, an’—­an’—­an’ nobody comes, an’ nobody’s ever going to come any more.  Oh, Trina!” He put his arms about her and drew her down closer to him.