But Mr. Opp was beyond pleasantries. “You’d keep Nick?” he asked. “I wouldn’t consider anything that would cut Nick out.”
“By all means,” said Hinton. “I’m counting on you and Nick to initiate me into the mysteries of the profession. You could be city editor, and Nick—well, we could make him foreman.”
One last hope was left to Mr. Opp, and he clung to it desperately, not daring to voice it until the end.
“The name,” he said faintly, “would of course remain ‘The Opp Eagle’?”
Hinton dropped his eyes; he could not stand the wistful appeal in the drawn face opposite.
[p311]
“No,” he said shortly; “that’s a—little too personal. I think I should call my paper ‘The Weekly News.’”
Mr. Opp could never distinctly remember what happened after that. He knew that he had at first declined the offer, that he had been argued with, had reconsidered, and finally accepted a larger sum than he had asked for; but the details of the transaction were like the setting of bones after an accident.
He remembered that he had sat where Hinton left him, staring at the floor until Nick came to close the office; then he had a vague impression of crossing the fields and standing with his head against the old sycamore-tree where the birds had once whispered of love. After that he knew that he had met Hinton and Guinevere coming up the river road hand in hand, that he had gotten home after supper was over, and had built a bridge of blocks for Miss Kippy.
Then suddenly he had wakened to full consciousness, staggered out of the house to the woodshed, and shivered down into [p312] a miserable heap. There in the darkness he seemed to see things, for the first time in his life, quite as they were. His gaze, accustomed to the glittering promise of the future, peered fearfully into the past, and reviewed the long line of groundless hopes, of empty projects, of self-deceptions. Shorn of its petty shams and deceits, and stripped of its counterfeit armor of conceit, his life lay naked before him, a pitiful, starved, futile thing.
“I’ve just been similar to Kippy,” he sobbed, with his face in his hands, “continually pretending what wasn’t so. I acted like I was young, and good-looking, and—and highly educated; and look at me! Look at me!” he demanded fiercely of the kindling-wood.