As the play went on, the rich jacqueminot-red flamed into her cheeks, and burnt there a steady blaze to the end. The people about her laughed and clapped, and at times they seemed to be crying. But Marcia sat through every part as stoical as a savage, making no sign, except for the flaming color in her cheeks, of interest or intelligence. Bartley talked of the play all the way home, but she said nothing, and in their own room he asked: “Didn't you really like it? Were you disappointed? I haven't been able to get a word out of you about it. Didn't you like Boucicault?” “I didn't know which he was,” she answered, with impassioned exaltation. “I didn't care for him. I only thought of that poor girl, and her husband who despised her--” 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.”