He tossed the card to his father, who looked at it quietly, and then gave it to his wife.  “Perhaps I’d as well see him?”

“See him!” she returned in accents in which all the intensity of her soul was centred.  By an effort of self-control which no words can convey a just sense of she remained with her children, while her husband with a laugh more teasing than can be imagined went into the drawing-room to meet Burnamy.

The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summer as to clothes, and he looked not merely haggard but shabby.  He made an effort for dignity as well as gayety, however, in stating himself to March, with many apologies for his persistency.  But, he said, he was on his way West, and he was anxious to know whether there was any chance of his ‘Kasper Hauler’ paper being taken if he finished it up.  March would have been a far harder-hearted editor than he was, if he could have discouraged the suppliant before him.  He said he would take the Kasper Hauler paper and add a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollars a thousand words.  Then Burnamy’s dignity gave way, if not his gayety; he began to laugh, and suddenly he broke down and confessed that he had come home in the steerage; and was at his last cent, beyond his fare to Chicago.  His straw hat looked like a withered leaf in the light of his sad facts; his thin overcoat affected March’s imagination as something like the diaphanous cast shell of a locust, hopelessly resumed for comfort at the approach of autumn.  He made Burnamy sit down, after he had once risen, and he told him of Major Eltwin’s wish to see him; and he promised to go round with him to the major’s hotel before the Eltwins left town that afternoon.

While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs. March was kept from breaking in upon them only by the psychical experiment which she was making with the help and sympathy of her daughter at the window of the dining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street.  At the first hint she gave of the emotional situation which Burnamy was a main part of, her son; with the brutal contempt of young men for other young men’s love affairs, said he must go to the office; he bade his mother tell his father there was no need of his coming down that day, and he left the two women together.  This gave the mother a chance to develop the whole fact to the daughter with telegrammic rapidity and brevity, and then to enrich the first-outline with innumerable details, while they both remained at the window, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely intervals, with no sense of iteration for either of them, “I told her to come in the morning, if she felt like it, and I know she will.  But if she doesn’t, I shall say there is nothing in fate, or Providence either.  At any rate I’m going to stay here and keep longing for her, and we’ll see whether there’s anything in that silly theory of your father’s.  I don’t believe there is,” she said, to be on the safe side.