“It was loathsome, all the same,” his wife insisted.  “It’s the end of Mr. Fulkerson, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I didn’t tell you before,” March resumed, after a moment, “of my little interview with Conrad Dryfoos after his father left,” and now he went on to repeat what had passed between him and the young man.

“I suspect that he and his father had been having some words before the old man came up to talk with me, and that it was that made him so furious.”

“Yes, but what a strange position for the son of such a man to take!  Do you suppose he says such things to his father?”

“I don’t know; but I suspect that in his meek way Conrad would say what he believed to anybody.  I suppose we must regard him as a kind of crank.”

“Poor young fellow!  He always makes me feel sad, somehow.  He has such a pathetic face.  I don’t believe I ever saw him look quite happy, except that night at Mrs. Horn’s, when he was talking with Miss Vance; and then he made me feel sadder than ever.”

“I don’t envy him the life he leads at home, with those convictions of his.  I don’t see why it wouldn’t be as tolerable there for old Lindau himself.”

“Well, now,” said Mrs. March, “let us put them all out of our minds and see what we are going to do ourselves.”

They began to consider their ways and means, and how and where they should live, in view of March’s severance of his relations with ’Every Other Week.’  They had not saved anything from the first year’s salary; they had only prepared to save; and they had nothing solid but their two thousand to count upon.  But they built a future in which they easily lived on that and on what March earned with his pen.  He became a free lance, and fought in whatever cause he thought just; he had no ties, no chains.  They went back to Boston with the heroic will to do what was most distasteful; they would have returned to their own house if they had not rented it again; but, any rate, Mrs. March helped out by taking boarders, or perhaps only letting rooms to lodgers.  They had some hard struggles, but they succeeded.

“The great thing,” she said, “is to be right.  I’m ten times as happy as if you had come home and told me that you had consented to do what Dryfoos asked and he had doubled your salary.”

“I don’t think that would have happened in any event,” said March, dryly.

“Well, no matter.  I just used it for an example.”

They both experienced a buoyant relief, such as seems to come to people who begin life anew on whatever terms.  “I hope we are young enough yet, Basil,” she said, and she would not have it when he said they had once been younger.

They heard the children’s knock on the door; they knocked when they came home from school so that their mother might let them in.  “Shall we tell them at once?” she asked, and ran to open for them before March could answer.

They were not alone.  Fulkerson, smiling from ear to ear, was with them.  “Is March in?” he asked.