"You'll try to persuade me that I should marry you on your money, take the opportunities your father can shove in my way. Oh, Doris, I know you too well!"

"No, no, I won't. I don't want--don't you see I don't want to make you do anything? I want to follow you!"

"That has been the trouble," he said, abruptly.

He turned, walked away, and sat down, gazing out through the window, feeling something dark and enveloping closing about him without his being able to slip away. She came impulsively to his side, flinging herself on the floor at his knees, carried away with the intensity of her emotion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'What does all the rest amount to?' she said breathlessly. 'I want you'"]

"What does all the rest amount to!" she said breathlessly. "I want you!

I want a man, not a dummy, in my life. I want some one to look up to, bigger, stronger than I am, that can make me do things."

He put his hand on hers, thrilling as he bent quickly and kissed it.

"The trouble has been," he said slowly, "all this time I've been trying to come to your ways of living, to reach you. Doris, I can't promise; I'm not sure of myself, of what I think--"

"Oh, it would be such a dreadful thing if you were to let me go now,"

she said suddenly, covering her face. "Now, when I know what I could do!"

"Yes," he a.s.sented, feeling too the power he had suddenly acquired to make or mar a life, and with that power the responsibility.

"You can do anything with me," she said in a whisper.

He felt a lump in his throat, a sense of being blocked at every turn, a horror of doing harm, and a wild pride in the thought that at the last this girl, whom he had rebelled against so often for being without emotion or pa.s.sion, was at his feet, without reserve, a warm, adoring woman.

"Doris, you have got to come to me on my footing," he said firmly at last.

She accepted it as the answer she had longed for, raising her face suffused with joy, pressing his hand to her heart, her eyes swimming with tears, inarticulate.

"Try me--anything! I'm happy--so happy--so afraid-- I was so afraid-- Oh, Bojo, to think I might never have known you--lost you!"

When a little calm had been reestablished, she wished to marry him at once, to live in one room in a boarding-house, if necessary, to prove her sincerity. He answered her evasively, pretending to laugh at her, feeling the while the leaden load of what by a trick of fate he had a.s.sumed at the moment when he had expected the completest freedom. Yet there was something so genuine, so uncalculated in her contrition, something so helpless and appealing to his strength in her surrender to his will and decision, that he felt stirred to a poignant pity, and shrank before the brutality of inflicting pain.

When he left, quiet and brooding, turning the corner of the Avenue his glance happened to go to a window on the second floor, and he saw Patsie looking down. He stopped, stumbling in his progress, and then, recovering himself, lifted his hat solemnly. She did not move nor make an answering gesture. He saw her only immobile, looking down at him.

When he returned to the Court and stopped mechanically at the desk for his mail, Della, with her welcoming smile, chided him.

"My, but you look awful serious, Mr. Crocker!"

"Am I?-- Yes, I suppose so," he said absent-mindedly.

He went through into the inner court that yesterday had seemed to him such a constricted little spot in the great city which had responded to his fortunate touch. Now, in the falling dusk, with the lights blossoming out, the court seemed very big, crowded with human beings in the battle of life, and he himself small and without significance.

"Well, I've gone and done it," he said to himself with a half laugh. "I wonder--"

He wondered, now that it was all over, now that the curtain had dropped on the drama of it, whether after all Drake had been right--whether he was seeing life through his emotions, and what the point of view of thirty-five and forty would be in retrospection.

"Well, I've chucked it all," he said, lingering in the quiet and the suffused half lights. "I took the bit in my teeth. There's no turning back now." He remembered his father and the old battling look of defiance in his eyes as he had exhorted his son.

"Guess, after all," he said grimly, feeling all at once drawn closer to his own, "I must be a chip of the old block."

Granning alone was in the study as he came in, spinning his hat on to the sofa.

"Well, Granning, I've up and done it," he said shortly.

"Eh, what?" said Granning, looking up rather alarmed.

He told him.

"And so, Granning, I'm a h.o.r.n.y-handed son of labor from this time forth," he said in conclusion. "You'll have to find me a job!" The laugh failed. It seemed out of place at that moment with Granning staring at him. He added quietly: "Guess self-respect is worth more than I thought!"

"G.o.d, I'm glad!" said Granning, bringing down his great fist.

He had never in all the long friendship seen Granning so stirred!

CHAPTER XX

BOJO HUNTS A JOB

"Well, now to hunt a job!"

He woke up the next morning with this one idea dominant, dressed to a whistling accompaniment, and came gaily to breakfast. A load seemed to have been suddenly lifted from his mind, the day fair and the future keen with the zest of a good fight without favors. The breakfast was delicious and the air alive with energy.

"Seems to me you're looking rather c.o.c.ky," said Marsh, studying him with surprise.

"Never felt fitter in my life," said Bojo, stealing a roll from DeLancy, who had completely lost his good spirits.

"What's up? Going to trim the market again?"

Bojo laughed, a free and triumphant laugh.

"Never again for me!" He added quickly, remembering the att.i.tude they had a.s.sumed for DeLancy's benefit: "Luck's been with me long enough-- I'm not going to bank on luck any more!"

Fred pushed his plate from him and went into the outer room without meeting their glances.

"I say, Bojo, one thing we ought to do," said Marsh under his breath: "get after the infant and give him a solemn dressing-down."

"You don't suppose he's fool enough to try the market again?"

"Who knows what he'll do?" said Marsh gloomily. "Sometimes I think it would have kept him out of more trouble if you'd let him be cleaned out!

"You mean Louise Varney-- Good Lord!"