He became fascinated with the notion.  He developed it in detail; but at the end he sighed and said:  “With this ‘Every Other Week’ work on my hands, of course I can’t attempt a novel.  But perhaps I sha’n’t have it long.”

She was instantly anxious to know what he meant, and the novel and Miss Leighton’s affair were both dropped out of their thoughts.  “What do you mean?  Has Mr. Fulkerson said anything yet?”

“Not a word.  He knows no more about it than I do.  Dryfoos hasn’t spoken, and we’re both afraid to ask him.  Of course, I couldn’t ask him.”

“No.”

“But it’s pretty uncomfortable, to be kept hanging by the gills so, as Fulkerson says.”

“Yes, we don’t know what to do.”

March and Fulkerson said the same to each other; and Fulkerson said that if the old man pulled out, he did not know what would happen.  He had no capital to carry the thing on, and the very fact that the old man had pulled out would damage it so that it would be hard to get anybody else to put it.  In the mean time Fulkerson was running Conrad’s office-work, when he ought to be looking after the outside interests of the thing; and he could not see the day when he could get married.

“I don’t know which it’s worse for, March:  you or me.  I don’t know, under the circumstances, whether it’s worse to have a family or to want to have one.  Of course—­of course!  We can’t hurry the old man up.  It wouldn’t be decent, and it would be dangerous.  We got to wait.”

He almost decided to draw upon Dryfoos for some money; he did not need any, but, he said maybe the demand would act as a hint upon him.  One day, about a week after Alma’s final rejection of Beaton, Dryfoos came into March’s office.  Fulkerson was out, but the old man seemed not to have tried to see him.

He put his hat on the floor by his chair, after he sat down, and looked at March awhile with his old eyes, which had the vitreous glitter of old. eyes stimulated to sleeplessness.  Then he said, abruptly, “Mr. March, how would you like to take this thing off my hands?”

“I don’t understand, exactly,” March began; but of course he understood that Dryfoos was offering to let him have ‘Every Other Week’ on some terms or other, and his heart leaped with hope.

The old man knew he understood, and so he did not explain.  He said:  “I am going to Europe, to take my family there.  The doctor thinks it might do my wife some good; and I ain’t very well myself, and my girls both want to go; and so we’re goin’.  If you want to take this thing off my hands, I reckon I can let you have it in ’most any shape you say.  You’re all settled here in New York, and I don’t suppose you want to break up, much, at your time of life, and I’ve been thinkin’ whether you wouldn’t like to take the thing.”