of letting the house furnished for the winter; that implied their return to it, but it cost him pangs of the keenest misery to advertise it; and, when a tenant was actually found, it was all he could do to give him the lease.  He tried his wife’s love and patience as a man must to whom the future is easy in the mass but terrible as it translates itself piecemeal into the present.  He experienced remorse in the presence of inanimate things he was going to leave as if they had sensibly reproached him, and an anticipative homesickness that seemed to stop his heart.  Again and again his wife had to make him reflect that his depression was not prophetic.  She convinced him of what he already knew, and persuaded him against his knowledge that he could be keeping an eye out for something to take hold of in Boston if they could not stand New York.  She ended by telling him that it was too bad to make her comfort him in a trial that was really so much more a trial to her.  She had to support him in a last access of despair on their way to the Albany depot the morning they started to New York; but when the final details had been dealt with, the tickets bought, the trunks checked, and the handbags hung up in their car, and the future had massed itself again at a safe distance and was seven hours and two hundred miles away, his spirits began to rise and hers to sink.  He would have been willing to celebrate the taste, the domestic refinement, of the ladies’ waiting-room in the depot, where they had spent a quarter of an hour before the train started.  He said he did not believe there was another station in the world where mahogany rocking-chairs were provided; that the dull-red warmth of the walls was as cozy as an evening lamp, and that he always hoped to see a fire kindled on that vast hearth and under that aesthetic mantel, but he supposed now he never should.  He said it was all very different from that tunnel, the old Albany depot, where they had waited the morning they went to New York when they were starting on their wedding journey.

“The morning, Basil!” cried his wife.  “We went at night; and we were going to take the boat, but it stormed so!” She gave him a glance of such reproach that he could not answer anything, and now she asked him whether he supposed their cook and second girl would be contented with one of those dark holes where they put girls to sleep in New York flats, and what she should do if Margaret, especially, left her.  He ventured to suggest that Margaret would probably like the city; but, if she left, there were plenty of other girls to be had in New York.  She replied that there were none she could trust, and that she knew Margaret would not stay.  He asked her why she took her, then—­why she did not give her up at once; and she answered that it would be inhuman to give her up just in the edge of the winter.  She had promised to keep her; and Margaret was pleased with the notion of going to New York, where she had a cousin.