They did not move for the reason that Maisie did. Not for forty-eight hours did Tom learn of her departure. As Mrs. Danker kept not a boarding house but a rooming house, and her guests went days at a time without seeing their landlady, he had no sources of information when Maisie, as she sometimes did, kept herself out of sight. Watching for her on the Monday and the Tuesday following his Sunday night talk with Honey, he thought it strange that she never appeared in the hallway, though he had no cause to be alarmed. He was going to leave Honey, get a job, and be independent. When he had added a little more to his fund in New York, he would propose to Maisie, and marry her if she would take him. He would be eighteen, perhaps nineteen by the time he was able to do this, an early, but not an impossible, age at which to be a husband.
On both these days he had gone to school from force of habit, but on the Wednesday he was surprised by a letter. Though he had never seen Maisie's writing, the postmark said Nashua. Before tearing the envelope he had a premonition of her flight.
A telegram on Monday morning had bidden her come home at once, as her stepmother was dying. She had died. Till her father married again, which she supposed would be soon, she would have to care for
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 the four little brothers and sisters. That was all. On paper Maisie was laconic.
Since his mother's death no revolution in his inner life had upset the boy like this. The Tollivant experience had only left him a little hard and skeptical; that with the Quidmores had passed like the rain and the snow, scarcely affecting him. With Honey his need for affection had always been unfed, and for reasons he could not fathom. Maisie had made the give and take of life easy, natural. She had her limitations, her crude, and sometimes her cruel, insistences; but she liked him. He loved her. He was ready to say it now, because of the blank her loss had hollowed in his life. For the unformed, growing hot-blooded human thing to have nothing on which to spend itself is anguish. Sitting down at his deal table, he wrote to her out of a heart fuller and more passionate than poor Maisie could ever have understood.
All he had been planning in rebellion against fate he poured out now as devotion. He had meant to cut loose, to go to work, to live on nothing, to save his money, and be ready to marry her in a year or two. And yet, on second thoughts, if he went through college, their position in the end would be so much better that perhaps the original plan was the best one. He thought only of her, and of what would make her happiest. He loved her—loved her—loved her.
Maisie wrote back that she saw no harm in their being engaged, and she wouldn't press him for a ring till he felt himself able to give her one. For herself she didn't care, but if she told the girls she was
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 engaged to a fellow, and had no ring to corroborate her word, she wouldn't be believed. In case he ever felt equal to the purchase she was sending him the size in the circlet of thread inclosed.
Tom was heroic. He had never thought of a ring, and a ring would mean more money. Be it so! He would spend more money. He would spend more money if he mortgaged his whole future to procure it. Maisie should not be shamed among her friends in Nashua.
Giving all his free hours to wandering about and pricing rings, he found them less expensive than he feared. Maisie having once confided to him her longing for a diamond, a diamond he meant to make it if it cost him fifty dollars. But he found one for twenty, as big as a small pea, and flashing in the sunshine like a lighthouse. The young Jew who sold it assured him that it would have cost a hundred, except for a tiny flaw which only an expert could detect. On its reception Maisie was delighted. He felt himself almost a married man.
The rest of the winter went by peaceably. With Honey he declared a truce of God. He would go to college, and live up to all that had been planned; but Honey must look on his own self-sacrifice as of the nature of a loan which would be repaid. Honey was ready to promise anything, while, in the hope of getting through college in three years instead of four, Tom worked with increased zeal. Then, one day, when spring had come round, he stumbled on Guy and Hildred Ansley.
It was in Louisburg Square, as usual. Having
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 arrived from the south the night before, they were sailing soon for Europe.
"Rotten luck!" the fat boy complained. "Got to trail a tutor along too, so that I shan't fall down on the Harvard exam when it comes. Wish I was you."
"If you were Mr. Whitelaw, Guy," his sister reminded him, "you'd find something else to worry you. We all have our troubles, haven't we, Mr. Whitelaw?"
"She's got nothing to worry her," the brother protested. "If she was me, with mother scared all the time that I'll be too hot or too cold or too tired or too hungry, or that some damn thing or other'll make me sick...."
"All the same," Tom broke in, "it's something to have a mother to make a fuss."
The girl looked sympathetic. "You haven't, have you?"
"Oh, I get along."
"Guy says you live with a guardian."
"You may call him a guardian if you like, but the word is too big. You only have a guardian when you've something to guard, and I haven't anything."
"Yes, but how did you ever ...?"
Once more Tom said to himself, "It's the way she looks at you." He knew what she was trying to ask him, and in order to be open and aboveboard, he gave her the few main facts of his life. He did it briefly, hurriedly, throwing emphasis only on the point that, to keep him from becoming a State ward the second time, his stevedore friend had brought him to Boston and sent him to school.
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"He must be an awfully good man!"
He was going to tell her that he was when the brother gave the talk another twist.
"What are you going to do in your holidays?"
"Work, if I can find a job."
"What kind of job?"
He explained that for the last two summers he had worked round the Quincy and Faneuil Hall markets, but that he had outgrown them. A two-fisted, he-man's job was what he would look for now, and had no doubt that he would get it.
"After you've left Harvard what are you going to be?"
"Banking's what I'd like best, but most likely I'll have to make it barbering. What are you going to be yourself?"
"Oh, I've got to be a corporation lawyer. My luck! Just because dad'll have the business to take me into."
"But what would you like better?"
The piggy face broke into one of its captivating grins. "Hanged if I know, unless it'd be an orphan and an only child."
The meeting was important because of what it led to. A few days later Tom heard the wheezy girlish voice calling behind him in the street: "Tom! Tom!"
He turned and walked back. During the winter the fat boy had expanded, not so much in height as in girth and jelliness. He came up, puffing from his run.
"Can you drive a car?"
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Tom hesitated. "I don't know that you'd call it driving a car. I can drive—after a fashion. Mr. Quidmore used to let me run his Ford, when we were alone in it, and no one was looking. Since then I've sometimes driven the market delivery teams for a block or two, nothing much, just to see what it was like. I know I could pick it up with a few lessons. I'm a natural driver—a horse or anything. Why?"
"Because my old man said that if you could drive, he might help you get your summer's job."
"Where? What kind of job?"
"I don't know. He said that if you wanted to talk it over to come round to our house this evening at nine o'clock."
At nine that evening Tom was shown up into another of those rooms which marked the gulf between his own way of living and that of people like the Ansleys, and at the same time woke the atavistic pang. His impression was only a blurred one of comfort, color, shaded lights, and richness. From the many books he judged that it was what they would call the library, but any judgment was subconscious because the human presences came first. A man wearing a dinner jacket and scanning an evening paper was sunk into one deep armchair; in another a lady, demi-décolletée, was reading a book. It was his first intimation that people ever wore what he called "dress-clothes" when dining only with their families.
He was announced by Pilcher, who had led him upstairs. "This is the young man, sir."
Having reached something like friendly terms with
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 the son and daughter, Tom had expected from the parents the kind of courtesy shown to strangers when you shake hands with them and ask them to sit down. Mr. Ansley only let the paper drop to his knees with an "Oh!" in response to the butler, and looked up.
"You're the young fellow my son has spoken of. He tells me you can drive a car."
Repeating what he had already said to Guy as to his experience with cars, Tom expressed confidence in his ability to obtain a license, if it should become worth his while.
"It wouldn't be difficult driving such as you get in the crowded parts of a city. It would be chiefly station work, over country roads."
He explained himself further. In the New Hampshire summer colony where the Ansleys had their place, the residents were turning a large country house into an inn which would be like a club, or a club which would be like an inn. It would not be open to ordinary travelers, since ordinary travelers would bring in people whom they didn't want. The guests would be their own friends, duly invited or introduced. He, Mr. Ansley, was chairman of the motor-car committee, but as he was going to Europe he was taking up the matter in advance. On general grounds he would have preferred an older man and one with more experience, but the inn-club was a new undertaking and not too well financed. More experienced men would cost more money. For the station work they could afford but eighty dollars a month, with a room in the garage, and board. Moreover, the jobs they could offer being only for the summer,
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 the promoters hoped that a few young men and women working for their own education might take advantage of the scheme.
Eighty dollars a month, with a room to himself, even if it had only been in a stable, and board in addition, glittered before Tom's eyes like Aladdin's treasure house. Having thanked Mr. Ansley for the kind suggestion, he assured him he could give satisfaction if taken on. All the chauffeurs who had let him have a few minutes at the steering-wheel had told him that he possessed the eye, the nerve, and the quickness which make a good driver, in addition to which he knew that he did himself.
"How old are you?"
It was a question Tom always found difficult to answer. He coul............