Until eleven o’clock he was busy with the morning instalment of traveling-salesmen who came to offer their wares. This duty disposed of, he strolled out into the department where he was supposed to oversee the stock and clerks. Wicked hopes that she, the lady of his dream romance, would return he suppressed so firmly that he had a continuous ache in his throat. Gone were his shimmering dreams, his vistas of poetic reverie. He threw himself desperately into the business of arranging displays, stationing clerks, verifying price-tags. He was thoroughly melancholy and businesslike and stern-faced and miserable. His evenings at the boarding-house were even more uncomfortable than his days in the store. Mrs. Benson had lost no time in announcing her engagement, and Mr. Francis now occupied the place of honor at her right hand at meals; he had long refused this place through feelings of delicacy about trespassing on Mrs. Benson’s known reverence for her late husband, and the honor sat heavily upon him. The smiles and insinuations of the boarders, the sordid jocularity of it all, seared his soul. Idealist that he was, his sense of humor was not much developed; and remarks like, “Can’t you just see Mr. Francis walking the floor with a bundle of yell in his arms?” sent all the blood from his heart into his face, and back again, in two frantic leaps. On one point he was trying to be firm: he would not let Mrs. Benson read in “The Book of his Heart.” She found it on the second evening of their prenuptial bliss in the front parlor, and triumphantly drew it forth. Desperately he reclaimed his property; frantically he argued that it was sacred to him, that there were some things they wouldn’t have to share in common. No theory could have been more repugnant to Mrs. Benson, and none could have so solidified her determination to read that “Personal Journal” from cover to cover. The issues were pitched, the armies drawn up, the bugles blown; and struggle as he would, Mr. Francis realized that he was foredoomed to the woe of the vanquished. She would read the book, she would despise it, and she would burn it because of its wicked references to women other than herself. Realizing this certain outcome, Mr. Francis vacillated between the wisdom of burning the book himself and the wickedness of hiding it and telling her that he had burned it. In the meantime he kept his coat buttoned and his door locked. On Thursday, April 28, he wrote at one o’clock in the morning: “God have mercy on me, a miserable sinner! She was in again to-day, and I adore her still.