“Oh, now!  Don’t you be a poet, Fulkerson!”

“I do!  He seemed to take a kind of shine to you from the day you wouldn’t turn off old Lindau; he did, indeed.  It kind of shook him up.  It made him think you had something in you.  He was deceived by appearances.  Look here!  I’m going round to see Mrs. March with you, and explain the thing to her.  I know Mrs. March!  She wouldn’t believe you knew what you were going in for.  She has a great respect for your mind, but she don’t think you’ve got any sense.  Heigh?”

“All right,” said March, glad of the notion; and it was really a comfort to have Fulkerson with him to develop all the points; and it was delightful to see how clearly and quickly she seized them; it made March proud of her.  She was only angry that they had lost any time in coming to submit so plain a case to her.

Mr. Dryfoos might change his mind in the night, and then everything would be lost.  They must go to him instantly, and tell him that they accepted; they must telegraph him.

“Might as well send a district messenger; he’d get there next week,” said Fulkerson.  “No, no!  It ’ll all keep till to-morrow, and be the better for it.  If he’s got this fancy for March, as I say, he ain’t agoing to change it in a single night.  People don’t change their fancies for March in a lifetime.  Heigh?”

When Fulkerson turned up very early at the office next morning, as March did, he was less strenuous about Dryfoos’s fancy for March.  It was as if Miss Woodburn might have blown cold upon that theory, as something unjust to his own merit, for which she would naturally be more jealous than he.

March told him what he had forgotten to tell him the day before, though he had been trying, all through their excited talk, to get it in, that the Dryfooses were going abroad.

“Oh, ho!” cried Fulkerson.  “That’s the milk in the cocoanut, is it?  Well, I thought there must be something.”

But this fact had not changed Mrs. March at all in her conviction that it was Mr. Dryfoos’s fancy for her husband which had moved him to make him this extraordinary offer, and she reminded him that it had first been made to him, without regard to Fulkerson.  “And perhaps,” she went on, “Mr. Dryfoos has been changed—–­softened; and doesn’t find money all in all any more.  He’s had enough to change him, poor old man!”

“Does anything from without change us?” her husband mused aloud.  “We’re brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of people’s thinking, nowadays.  But I doubt it, especially if the thing outside is some great event, something cataclysmal, like this tremendous sorrow of Dryfoos’s.”

“Then what is it that changes us?” demanded his wife, almost angry with him for his heresy.