It was Saturday night—the married “drummer’s” homesick night. Mr. Martin Prescott, walking into the long, narrow hotel bedroom, felt more than ever the wearing familiarity of the scene that met his eye. There were the same dull carpet, the Michigan pine furniture, the drab striped wallpaper, the windows shaded only by little slatted inside shutters, to which he was used in third-rate towns. There was even the same indefinable chill, dusty smell that was associated with evenings of figuring over sales on the coverless table, under the weak, single-armed gas burner that jutted out from the wall at the side of the bureau. Yet, cheerless as it was, he preferred its seclusion just now to the more convivial bar-room, where the liquor and the jokes and the conversation of “the boys” had all the same jading flavour, and he felt unequal to bracing his spirit sufficiently to receiving the Saturday confidences of the garrulous or the weary. Reticent both by habit and principle as to his intimate affairs, he was no stranger to his kind, and in the top strata of[56] his mind were embedded many curious evidences of other men’s lives.

But to-night he had a matter on his mind that companied him whether he would or no, and he was sore at having to stay over in this little town, from which there was egress once only in twenty-four hours. He had waited for a customer who did not arrive in the place until too late for him to get out of it, and had hereby missed the letter from his wife which was waiting for him some hundred miles further westward. Prescott did not, in a way, dislike travelling as a business; his wife always comforted herself with the thought that there were other modes of earning a living more inherently disagreeable to him, yet there were days and nights of a paucity which he was glad she could not picture. Saturday night away from home in this kind of a town, without a letter—when the last one had been disquieting—reached the limit of endurance. He felt that he had travelled long enough.

He made his preparations for the evening with the wontedness of custom. He locked the door, turned up the gas, and worked over the screw in the lukewarm radiator. Then he drew the cane-bottomed rocking-chair underneath the gas burner, and placed a couple of magazines on the bureau beside[57] him, his lean, bearded face reflected in the shadowy mirror above it. He opened his valise and took from it a folding leather photograph case containing the picture of a woman and three children. Prescott gazed at it hard for a few moments before standing it up beside the magazines. He was trying to find an answer to the question he was debating: if he could manage in some way to supplement by three hundred dollars more the income of a new position offered him, he might be able to accept it and stay at home for ever.

He lit his pipe and, putting his heavily booted feet on a chair, began to cut the leaves of a magazine with his pocket-knife. He had meant to get his slippers out of the bag and make himself comfortable, but somehow, after looking at the photographs, he had forgotten about himself. He had written his daily letter to his wife before the last-going train, and he would not begin a fresh sheet now—no matter what he wrote, she would divine his mood. You have to be very careful what you write in a letter that is read some days after, lest you cloud the sunshine for another when it has brightened again for you.

“What is it?”

He sprang up as a knock came to the[58] door, after first hastily sweeping the photograph case into the valise. He hoped devoutly that it was not a visitor; there was no one in this town whose presence would not be an intrusion to-night. But he gave a glad start of surprise as his eyes fell on the man standing with the bell-boy in the hall.

“Brenner! Well, this is good! I never dreamed of seeing you here.”

“I don’t wonder,” said the stranger, a pleasant, fresh-faced, broad-shouldered young fellow, with a light mustache. “It’s ages since I set eyes on you; I changed my route, and then, two years ago, I married. We only moved here last spring. Jim Halliday told me this afternoon that you were in town. What a soak he is! But don’t let’s waste time here; I want you to come right around and spend the evening at our house; I want you to meet my wife.”

“I’ll be delighted,” said Prescott with alacrity. He locked the bedroom door and the two walked out together, conversing briskly as they went. He and the younger Brenner had been chance companions on several notable trips in former years, drawn together in spite of dissimilarities in taste and education by a certain clear and simple cleanness of mind which unerringly divines its kin. The air had seemed raw and chill earlier, but good[59] fellowship had put its warmth into the winter world with Brenner’s presence.

“So you’re married,” said Prescott presently. “I remember that I heard of it. I’ve wondered at not meeting you anywhere; I didn’t know you’d given up the road.”

“Well, yes, I’ve quit,” said Brenner. “My wife didn’t like me to be away so much, used to get scared nights, and there’s a sight of things to see to when you have a house—the coal, you know, and the plumbing getting out of order, and then after the boy came—oh, yes, I’ve quit it all right. Seems sort of tied down in a way after you’ve been your own boss, but I’m not sorry—I’m pretty well fixed, I guess. Travelling’s all very well for a single man, but it gets to be an awful pull after you’re married. You miss a lot.”

“I’ve been travelling for sixteen years,” said Prescott soberly; “two years before I married—at twenty-four—and fourteen since.”

“That so? It’s a pretty long time.”

“Yes, it is. I’ve been wanting to give it up.” He hesitated, and then continued with rare expansiveness: “The fact is, there’s a position open for me at home now, but I can’t quite see my way clear to taking it. The salary’s nominally all right, but there’s my living to be taken into account, and other things. I figure out that it would mean about[60] three hundred dollars a year less than we have now—and I don’t see how we could live on that. You see, the trouble is it’s away out of the line I’m in now—yet there may be a future in it.”

He went into explanatory detail, led on by Brenner’s questioning interest.

“Couldn’t you make it up in any way by outside commissions?”

Prescott nodded. “Ah, that’s what I’m trying to get at. You’re a wise man to have made the break early, Brenner. Every year I’ve meant to.” Prescott spoke with a bitter patience. “I’ve never thought of my being on the road as anything but temporary, and here I’m at it still. The longer you wait, the harder it gets to change; you don’t know how to take the risk. I haven’t told my wife yet about this offer, for I don’t want to disappoint her. I hoped to have had a letter from her to-night—the last one was rather disquieting—but I’m behind my schedule.”

“Well, I know what that is,” said Brenner heartily. “I had a letter from Mame once after we were first married—she’d cried all over the paper in big blots; she thought she’d die before morning. Well, my train was snowed up in a South Dakota blizzard and I never got another letter for a week. Holy smoke! I never want to go through that[61] kind of a racket again. Then, when I did hear, I found she’d been to a party the next evening as chipper as you please—belle of the ball. I tell you there’s too much seesaw about that sort of thing for a limited nature like mine; but I suppose I’d have got used to teetering on it same as the rest of you, only she made up her mind I was to quit—and quit I did. Mame runs me! I guess she’ll try and run you too; she tries to run most any one that comes to hand. This is my shebang.”

He stopped before a small cottage whose slender piazza was ornamentally fenced in with heavy wooden scroll work, and, opening the front door, ushered the guest into the narrow hall. “Hello, Mame! Here’s Prescott. Prescott—he’s one of ‘the boys,’ you know.”

“We’re so glad to have you here,” said Mrs. Brenner, a stout young woman in a light blue flannel shirt-waist; she had prettily untidy hair, large gentle brown eyes, and small, very soft hands. She brushed the light strands of hair out of the way with a pretty gesture of one hand, while she extended the other to Prescott. He felt an instant sensation of comfort, increased when he found himself finally settled in an armchair in a room that reflected the mistress of it in a sort[62] of warm, attractive disorderliness. A work-basket, with the sewing half out of it, occupied a footstool; the table, lighted by a lamp with a pictorial shade, was piled high with magazines and papers; a banjo sprawled on the sofa amid the tumbled pillows, and a child’s pink worsted sock and a china cat lay in front of the bright little kerosene stove in the middle of the floor.

Mrs. Brenner followed his gaze towards the infant’s belongings and blushed as she laughed.

“Harve won’t let me pick them up! Isn’t it silly of him?”

“I believe she puts them there herself, because she thinks I like it,” said Brenner serenely. “Oh, she’s up to tricks! She sent me for you to-night. Do you remember the evening I spent at your house five years ago? The night I had the cold, and your wife put the mustard plaster on me?”

“Why so she did,” said Prescott delightedly. “I’d forgotten you’d seen my wife and the children. Let me see—there were only two of them—Margaret’s four years old.”

“It was the hottest mustard plaster I ever felt,” said Brenner reminiscently. “I went to sleep with it on. When I woke up—I guess I was sort of dazed—I thought the house was on fire, and started to run down-stairs,[63] but Mrs. Prescott caught on in some way, and sent you to head me off. Hottest mustard plaster I ever felt. Well, your wife was mighty good to me. Not so very rugged-looking though herself, as I remember.”

“Oh, she’s very strong,” said Prescott, with defensive hauteur; “very. She’s never ill.” He turned the conversation towards the Brenner ménage. “And how old is your child?”

But he found himself, later, confiding in Mrs. Brenner, after the cozy little supper in the rag-carpeted dining-room, where she had set out hot mince pie and cheese and cookies, and Brenner had made the coffee. Prescott, who owned the impaired digestion of the travelling man, had long passed the stage of taking whiskey to supplement all deficiencies, arriving at the final attitude of the invariable soft boiled eggs for breakfast and rare roast beef for dinner, but to-night he had recklessly refused to take sickly thought for the morrow. Mame’s pie was good.

Brenner was sitting now cross-legged on the sofa, strumming obliviously on the banjo, while Prescott, his arms on the dining-table, leaned towards Mrs. Brenner’s sympathy. Something in this warm home atmosphere was too much for him.

“She—I—there’re some things you can’t[64] talk about, Mrs. Brenner. Now, the other night my wife had to get up at two o’clock in the morning and go out over the snow to the doctor’s; Martin, that’s my boy, was taken sick. Little Emma wouldn’t let her mother go alone—she’s only nine. My wife wrote me that it didn’t scare her a bit, but it does seem sort of pitiful—doesn’t it?—to think of their doing it. It’s never happened before, but the neighbours we used to have moved away.”

“Oh, you mind it more than she would,” said Mrs. Brenner encouragingly. Her soft eyes made a temporary home for him.

“Things seem to tell on her more than they used, though she tries hard not to let me see it. She’s always worrying about me, in this kind of weather, for fear I’ll come down with something alone in a hotel. But my wife”—Prescott paused a moment awkwardly—“my wife’s awfully good; I’m not that way myself, Mrs. Brenner, but I don’t think I would care for a woman that wasn’t religious. She thinks everything is meant. And it helps her a lot.”

“Yes, I know,” said Mrs. Brenner. She added after a little silence: “Was your boy very ill?”

“Ill? No; he was all right the next day. But she caught cold; she doesn’t think enough[65] of herself; she’s that kind, you know. It’s clear foolishness! Last time I was home I found that when the girl left—we had one for six years and have been changing hoodlums every fifteen minutes since she married—well, when the last one left I found she’d been carrying up the coal for the fires because the boy got tired, and she was afraid it would hurt him. Husky little beggar, I’d tire him all right! He’s just getting to the age when he’s too much for his mother—nothing wrong about him, but he worries her. He slings his books at the brakemen when he goes in to school on the train and gets complained of—and he smokes cigarettes around the corner and the neighbours come and tell her, and it breaks her all up.”

“He needs a man,” said Mrs. Brenner.

“Yes. But you see I’m home so seldom she can’t bear to have me down on the children the only time I’m with them. You see, a man doesn’t think much whether he likes to travel or not—it’s just something that’s got to be done, if you’re in the business—but it’s hard on a woman. Some women seem to get used to it, though.”

“Ah,” murmured Mrs. Brenner, “when we married I said to my husband: ‘When I get over caring for you, then I’ll get over minding your leaving me—and not before.’”

[66]

“Why, that’s what my wife says!” said Prescott. He laughed, with a rising colour, and shook his head. “You women—you’re all alike. You don’t know what lots of good it’s done me to be here and talk to you to-night; it’s most as good as being home—not quite, though.”

“Can’t you stop travelling?” said Mrs. Brenner, going with penetrative instinct to the thought she felt. She added, after a pause: “Are you sure you can’t?”

He looked at her uncertainly. “How did you know that? No, I’m not sure I can’t—but I’m not sure I can. And I’m not so young as I was.”

“Think of it.” Her hand gave his a warm clasp; through her eyes he saw his wife. “Think of it.”

“God knows I do,” said Prescott huskily. His hand wrenched hers in its farewell, before he put on the overcoat Brenner brought him from the back hall.

All the way back to the hotel he was thinking over things. It all depended on that few hundred dollars extra, so absolutely necessary that, without it, he could not provide a shelter for his family. More than a living he no longer planned for. He looked at the future with the eye of the man who, whatever his abilities, has come to learn that, either from[67] early training, or environment, or the iron bands of need, more than a careful living can never be his. He could have enjoyed riches as well and more than many another man, but they were so out of all calculation that what they could buy no longer aroused in him any particular interest. He would never even be able to indulge in that pathetically ludicrous dream of the business man of retiring to a green and placid land and raising catalogue produce from theory. He would be able to save little, after educating his children, but the money to pay the insurance that would keep his wife from penury when he died. For all his days he must work in harness, and take no holiday but that which Death gives to the great rank and file.

Yet, in spite of these limitations, for all that he tacitly renounced, he had good measure. He had the freedom of spirit which belongs to him who, given a competence, envies not any man his wealth or his opportunity. He had gained a capacity for getting great and far-reaching happiness from the exquisite little joys of life. If he had a little of the inner sadness that comes of foregoing the ambitions natural to a man, it was not the sadness of defeat, but rather the thoughtful weighing of the loss as the least—all things considered—that he could have had. In the silent times[68] of those long journeyings by day and night over the earth, the pricelessness of the common blessing of a home had sunk deeper and deeper into his soul. And the spring of all this was in the love he and his wife had for each other, a love that was too much of a vital power to be consciously dwelt upon; it was rather an enlarging and enriching of the whole nature because they two were one in the possession of a country which it is given to but few of the married to see even afar off. Below all trouble lay ever a secret joy; whither he went, she companied him. In all the years of separation, they were less apart than many whose hands meet daily; there could be no real separation between them even after death.

But now—but now—she was getting tired. Her small face with its pure outlines, the sweet, nervous mouth and the loving eyes came before him—her low controlled voice, her quick motions, her rapid adjustment of all domestic problems that his brief stay at home might be bright and restful, the children at their best, the meals most home-like, and she herself dressed prettily, with the work so ordered that she might not lose a minute of his society. If callers came on one of those precious afternoons, she rebelled as if at a calamity. She had always been so brave,[69] so helpful, but she was not so strong as she had been, and the boy was too much for her. If he could but see his way a little clearer! He had the cautiousness of methods new to him that comes of the inexperience of manhood, far more frustrating than the inexperience of the boy.

Brenner came around the next day just before train time.

“Mame sent me,” he explained. “She’s been talking to me ever since you left. She’s got a brother in New York who’s in the line you’re looking up, and she has an idea you can fix up something with him in connection with the position you were telling me of. If you can carry some of his business with you I don’t see but it would help you out mighty well. He’s a good man—and he’ll do anything for Mame, if he can do it. She’s written him a letter, and here’s one for you.”

“I’m much obliged, I’m sure,” said Prescott politely. He did not speak with enthusiasm; he had a rooted distaste for a woman’s intervention in business matters, and by daylight his evening confidences rather annoyed him. Still——

“A telegram for you, sir,” said a boy, coming up.

Prescott took it and opened it mechanically.[70] He stood for a moment with his eyes glued to the paper, and when he looked up Brenner cried in horror:

“Not your wife, man!”

“No,” said Prescott thickly. “It’s little Margaret.” He consulted the paper. “She’s not dead—yet. She’s been run over. She may not be so badly hurt as they fear. My God! I can’t get there for two days!”

“Thank heaven the east-bound train’s on time,” said Brenner devoutly, and went home to be cheered by his Mame.

“Papa is to carry little Margaret up-stairs—think of it!—dear papa to carry her—such a treat! His arms are so much stronger than mamma’s.” It was a week since the day of the telegram.

“Mamma jiggles,” said the child roguishly, looking backward from the shelter of her father’s arms to the slender figure toiling up laboriously with shawls and pillows. “Mamma carries Marget all slippy.”

“Poor mamma,” said the father; “she has to do everything when I’m not here.” He pressed his lips to the soft baby cheek of the little girl who was getting well, but his thought was with the mother. “Now what on earth are you lugging all those things up for, Annie? Didn’t I tell you to[71] call Martin to take them? You know you’re all worn out.”

“He’s reading, and I thought I wouldn’t disturb him.”

“Where’s that magazine I had? There you go again! Why don’t you let the children wait on you?”

“I knew just where it was,” said the wife with eager excuse.

“Well, it’s their business to know where things are,” said Prescott severely; “they don’t help you half enough. When I go away to-morrow——”

The joy in his wife’s face went out as the light is snuffed out in a candle.

That evening, as they sat alone together in the cozy library after the children were in bed, she broke into the conversation with a tone that showed the effort. “I haven’t asked you yet what time you want breakfast to-morrow morning. I hope you don’t have to take the six-fifty, it’s so very dark and early, and you never really eat anything, no matter what I get for you.”

Prescott looked at the pure outline of her cheek and brow, and the stricken cheerfulness of her eyes. He hardly seemed to hear her words for a minute, and then answered absently:

“No; I’m not going so early to-morrow.[72] Hark, is that somebody coming up our steps?”

“Oh, I hope it’s no one to call! It would be dreadful when it’s our last evening together. No, thank goodness! It’s next door.”

“When I’ve been home five whole days that you didn’t count on, you oughtn’t to stand out for such a little thing as the last evening. It was well I could come—wasn’t it? When I got that telegram——”

He broke off with a shudder, and their hands clasped. Their minds traversed the past week with its terror and anxiety, and its later joy—the great happiness which comes from no new phase, but from the blessed continuance of the unnoticed daily good.

“You have been in town so much of the time,” she murmured half-jealously.

“Yes, I know. It was necessary.”

“You haven’t told me yet what time you want your breakfast.”

“Oh, any old time. I don’t think I’ll go in the morning.”

“Why didn’t you say so before?” She looked at him reproachfully. “Then I would have hired Maria for the day. Now I’ll have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen when I’ll want to be with you.”

[73]

“How would you behave if I were to stay home all the time?”

“How would I behave?” She gleamed at him with sudden sweet tremulous humour through the mistiness of her eyes. “I’d never come near you. I’d make calls and belong to all the societies in the place and not get back until after dinner-time. I’d go next door in the evening and leave you home reading. I’d behave the way other women do whose husbands come home every night. I expect I’d get tired of seeing you around. Don’t you believe it?” The gaiety in her tone flickered and went out, as if she were very, very tired. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I know you’ve been considering that offer—you didn’t tell me of it—and you’ve refused it. I’ve been watching you. And I don’t see how I’m going to let you go this time.”

“Annie!”

“Oh, forgive, forgive me! I’ll be brave again, I will indeed. But I’ve been through so much lately that just now—it gets so hard—so hard”—her voice was almost inaudible—“harder and harder. I’ve been praying—and praying.”

“Annie, dear, you’re all wrong. I’m not going to-morrow or Tuesday either. Can’t you guess?”

[74]

She lifted her head from his shoulder and pushed him from her. “How queer you act! What do you mean?”

He tried to bend a jovial gaze upon her.

“I’m not going to travel any more, Annie, ever. You were all wrong; I’ve taken the offer. I went to see Mrs. Brenner’s brother in town. I tell you that little woman in Wisconsin did you a mighty good turn! And I’ve taken the chances. I’ve figured it all out.” He tried to gather her to him, but she drew back. “Why, Annie, aren’t you glad? What makes you shake so?”

“You are going to stay now?”

“Yes, always. I’m going to look after my children and my—sweet—wife. Why Annie! Oh, you poor, poor girl, has it been as bad as that?”

He tried once more to draw her to him, but she eluded his grasp and was gone. He heard her light footfall above and then there was only silence.

He sat there by the table for a few minutes with a book before him, as he smoked, but he did not read. Once he went to the door and called “Annie!” softly, that little Margaret might not be wakened, and yet again, “Annie! Come down; I want to read to you,” but there was no response.

He lingered a moment hesitatingly, and[75] then went up the stairs himself, his feet pausing half-reluctantly on the steps. Thrice he halted, and then went on again into the room where she was a kneeling figure by the bed, her arms spread out upon it, and her hair falling over her shoulders. She raised her head momentarily with a backward glance of rapt joy at him before burying it again in the coverlet, and as his footfalls stopped on the threshold she held out one arm appealingly as if to encircle him beside her.

“No—no!” he said painfully. “No, Annie! I—I can’t—it wouldn’t be right. Annie, you don’t want me, dear; you don’t want—— No!”

Her white hand still mutely pleaded. Even at the very gate of heaven she could not be satisfied without him. He drew nearer, and a little nearer. Then, somehow, he had stumbled down awkwardly into the warm enclosure of her arm, and hid his face within her bosom.