And if he married her, still more emphatically than ever he could not go home. He would be guilty of bigamy, and the authorities in the States—who could never appreciate what a hard time Johnathan had endured through twenty-five hectic years—had very strict ideas about bigamy. And some day Mrs. Johnathan Forge, née Carlysle, might want to go home. Then how could he explain? What could he do?
Johnathan sighed and sloughed down in his chair. After all these years, happiness was within his grasp and he could not grasp it. The world was very hard. Hard! Hard! Hard!
There were other crosses in it, after all, besides Nathan.
II
Nathan went up to the desk and the Yates Hotel in Syracuse and asked for his key and his mail.
He received a postcard from Milly—asking him to send her money—a telephone and a gas bill which had been forwarded for payment, a letter from young Ted Thorne, his sales manager, and a long narrow envelope with a queer stamp. Nathan was puzzled by that stamp. It was a ten-sen stamp. What foreign country had sen among their coinage and who should be writing him from one of them?
He slit the envelope at the cigar counter while the clerk waited for him to select his smokes from a proffered handful. Then a queer, hard surprise smote him as he read:
Yokohama, Japan,
August 2, 1916.
Nathaniel Forge, Paris, Vt., U. S. A.