A Modern Instance eBook

She stopped.  Bartley looked at her a moment, and then caught her to him and fell a-laughing over her, till it seemed as if he never would end.  “And you thought—­you thought,” he cried, trying to get his breath,—­“you thought you were Eily, and I was Hardress Cregan!  Oh, I see, I see!” He went on making a mock and a burlesque of her tragical hallucination till she laughed with him at last.  When he put his hand up to turn out the gas, he began his joking afresh.  “The real thing for Hardress to do,” he said, fumbling for the key, “is to blow it out.  That’s what Hardress usually does when he comes up from the rural districts with Eily on their bridal tour.  That finishes off Eily, without troubling Danny Mann.  The only drawback is that it finishes off Hardress, too:  they’re both found suffocated in the morning.”

XIV.

The next day, after breakfast, while they stood together before the parlor fire, Bartley proposed one plan after another for spending the day.  Marcia rejected them all, with perfectly recovered self-composure.

“Then what shall we do?” he asked, at last.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, rather absently.  She added, after an interval, smoothing the warm front of her dress, and putting her foot on the fender, “What did those theatre-tickets cost?”

“Two dollars,” he replied carelessly.  “Why?”

Marcia gasped.  “Two dollars!  Oh, Bartley, we couldn’t afford it!”

“It seems we did.”

“And here,—­how much are we paying here?”

“That room, with fire,” said Bartley, stretching himself, “is seven dollars a day—­”

“We mustn’t stay another instant!” said Marcia, all a woman’s terror of spending money on anything but dress, all a wife’s conservative instinct, rising within her.  “How much have you got left?”

Bartley took out his pocket-book and counted over the bills in it.  “A hundred and twenty dollars.”

“Why, what has become of it all?  We had a hundred and sixty!”

“Well, our railroad tickets were nineteen, the sleeping-car was three, the parlor-car was three, the theatre was two, the hack was fifty cents, and we’ll have to put down the other two and a half to refreshments.”

Marcia listened in dismay.  At the end she drew a long breath.  “Well, we must go away from here as soon as possible,—­that I know.  We’ll go out and find some boarding-place.  That’s the first thing.”

“Oh, now, Marcia, you’re not going to be so severe as that, are you?” pleaded Bartley.  “A few dollars, more or less, are not going to keep us out of the poorhouse.  I just want to stay here three days:  that will leave us a clean hundred, and we can start fair.”  He was half joking, but she was wholly serious.

“No, Bartley!  Not another hour,—­not another minute!  Come!” She took his arm and bent it up into a crook, where she put her hand, and pulled him toward the door.