"Well, I guess it isn't so bad as you think. We'll wait a day or two, I guess. I am obliged to you for your kindness."
Sommers made no reply and left the house. The only result of this affair was that he found it disagreeable to call at the drug store. Besides, it was useless; no practice had come from his assiduous attendance. Finally, he saw one morning that his modest sign no longer waved from the pendent ladder. He did not take the trouble to inquire why it had been removed.
* * * * *
The winter was wearing on,—the slow, penurious winter of exhaustion after the acute fury of the spring and summer. These were hard times in earnest, not with the excitement of failures and bankruptcies, but with the steady grind of low wages, no employment, and general depression. The papers said things would be better in the fall, when the republican candidates would be elected. But it was a long time to wait for activity. Meanwhile the streets down town were filled with hungry forms, the remnant of the World's Fair mob swelled by the unemployed strikers. The city was poor, too. The school funds were inadequate. The usual increase in salary could not be paid. Instead, the board resolved to reduce the pay of the grade teachers, who had the lowest wages. Alves received but forty dollars a month now, and had been refused a night school for which she had applied.
When Alves timidly suggested that it would be cheaper for them to rent one of the many empty cottages in the vast region south of the parks, he put her off. That would be too much like the experience in the Ninety-first Street cottage, and he fought against the idea. There were a few dollars still left from the sale of his horse, his microscope, and other possessions. A few dollars each week came in from some work he had found in preparing plates for a professor of anatomy in the new university. Some weeks he could almost pay his board without drawing from his capital. They would hang on in this way.
Not that the Keystone Hotel was in itself very attractive. In spite of Webber's advice, he and Alves found it hard to mix with the other "guests." After they had been in the house several months, he fancied that the people avoided them. The harmless trio left their table, and in place of them came a succession of transient boarders. For a time he thought he was oversensitive, inclined to suspect his neighbors of avoiding him. But one evening Alves came into their room, where he was working at the anatomy plates, her face flushed with an unusual distress.
"What reason have they?" Sommers asked, going directly to the heart of the matter.
"None—unless Miss M'Gann has been talking carelessly. And she knows nothing—"
"No, she knows nothing," the doctor replied, looking at Alves intently.
"And there is nothing to be known."
"We think not!" she exclaimed. "I am not so sure that an unpleasant story couldn't be made."