“It can give me up, too.”
“Oh, nonsense! I guess there's not much fear of that. Now, I want you to telegraph Mr. Fulkerson, so that he'll find the despatch waiting for him when he gets to New York. I'll take the whole responsibility, Basil, and I'll risk all the consequences.”
III.
March's face had sobered more and more as she followed one hopeful burst with another, and now it expressed a positive pain. But he forced a smile and said: “There's a little condition attached. Where did you suppose it was to be published?”
“Why, in Boston, of course. Where else should it be published?”
She looked at him for the intention of his question so searchingly that he quite gave up the attempt to be gay about it. “No,” he said, gravely, “it's to be published in New York.”
She fell back in her chair. “In New York?” She leaned forward over the table toward him, as if to make sure that she heard aright, and said, with all the keen reproach that he could have expected: “In New York, Basil! Oh, how could you have let me go on?”
He had a sufficiently rueful face in owning: “I oughtn't to have done it, but I got started wrong. I couldn't help putting the best foot, forward at first—or as long as the whole thing was in the air. I didn't know that you would take so much to the general enterprise, or else I should have mentioned the New York condition at once; but, of course, that puts an end to it.”
“Oh, of course,” she assented, sadly. “We COULDN'T go to New York.”