tell her so, but I told her I wouldn't look at him if he were the only man in the world. She behaved shamefully about it. I'm going to make her leave me in New York when she goes up to Canada to see if Mr. Berwick can't do anything for us, and I'll write to you when she's gone because you know ever since Mrs. Kimball wrote her about the time we were out together that day she has been saying things about you, and perhaps she wouldn't leave me if she knew you, awful you, were in the city. Have a plan ready for me. You were always good at plans, weren't you? I know this letter is frightfully mixed up, but I have to have it posted before she comes back from buying the tickets and I have no time to read it over. I hope you will be glad to see me. I shall."
There was a postscript to say that if he were out of town "or anything," he was to write her, "Poste Restante," at the New York General Post-Office.
He read the letter over to see what boat she was coming on, or when she had sailed. There was, of course, no word of it. The thought that she might have arrived already, on the same steamship as her letter, came on him in a warm tremble of weakness.
She was poor! She would have to earn her living—in New York—with him! They would be together, on the level of a common poverty! . . . He looked up from the letter with a stupefied expression of guilty joy; for he was as if only partly awakened from sleep, his brain was still befuddled with the imaginary scenes of his play, and he confused reality with the pictures of his dreams and accepted her letter as an announce-
