“Something else, probably,” said March.  “But we won’t take this apartment till the ideal furnished flat winks out altogether.  We shall not have any trouble.  We can easily find some one who is going South for the winter and will be glad to give up their flat ‘to the right party’ at a nominal rent.  That’s my notion.  That’s what the Evanses did one winter when they came on here in February.  All but the nominality of the rent.”

“Yes, and we could pay a very good rent and still save something on letting our house.  You can settle yourselves in a hundred different ways in New York, that is one merit of the place.  But if everything else fails, we can come back to this.  I want you to take the refusal of it, Basil.  And we’ll commence looking this very evening as soon as we’ve had dinner.  I cut a lot of things out of the Herald as we came on.  See here!”

She took a long strip of paper out of her hand-bag with minute advertisements pinned transversely upon it, and forming the effect of some glittering nondescript vertebrate.

“Looks something like the sea-serpent,” said March, drying his hands on the towel, while he glanced up and down the list.  “But we sha’n’t have any trouble.  I’ve no doubt there are half a dozen things there that will do.  You haven’t gone up-town?  Because we must be near the ’Every Other Week’ office.”

“No; but I wish Mr. Fulkerson hadn’t called it that!  It always makes one think of ‘jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam to-day,’ in ‘Through the Looking-Glass.’  They’re all in this region.”

They were still at their table, beside a low window, where some sort of never-blooming shrub symmetrically balanced itself in a large pot, with a leaf to the right and a leaf to the left and a spear up the middle, when Fulkerson came stepping square-footedly over the thick dining-room carpet.  He wagged in the air a gay hand of salutation at sight of them, and of repression when they offered to rise to meet him; then, with an apparent simultaneity of action he gave a hand to each, pulled up a chair from the next table, put his hat and stick on the floor beside it, and seated himself.

“Well, you’ve burned your ships behind you, sure enough,” he said, beaming his satisfaction upon them from eyes and teeth.

“The ships are burned,” said March, “though I’m not sure we alone did it.  But here we are, looking for shelter, and a little anxious about the disposition of the natives.”

“Oh, they’re an awful peaceable lot,” said Fulkerson.  “I’ve been round among the caciques a little, and I think I’ve got two or three places that will just suit you, Mrs. March.  How did you leave the children?”

“Oh, how kind of you!  Very well, and very proud to be left in charge of the smoking wrecks.”

Fulkerson naturally paid no attention to what she said, being but secondarily interested in the children at the best.  “Here are some things right in this neighborhood, within gunshot of the office, and if you want you can go and look at them to-night; the agents gave me houses where the people would be in.”