"I don't believe I will be kept on at the store, after all. Only through January, anyway. "All the money we've got now is the nine dollars they gave me to-day. "Suppose that's been stolen, too, from our room. "Suppose I died. "What would happen to Father if I died? He'd have to go--some dreadful place--poor-house or some place-- "What would happen to me if he died? I'd be so lonely I couldn't stand it. He's always been so dear to me. "That clerk in the book-department that died from asphyxiation--I wonder if it was accident, after all. They said so, but she was so unhappy and all when she talked to me at lunch. "'Better jump in the river.' That would be cold and he hasn't got an overcoat. No, of course, that wouldn't make any difference-- "I wonder if gas suicide hurts much? "If we could only die together and neither of us be left-- "God wouldn't call that suicide--oh, He couldn't, not when there's two people that nobody wants and they don't ask anything but just to be together. That nobody really wants--my daughter don't--except maybe the Tubbses. And they are so poor, too. Nobody needs us and we just want to find a happy way to go off together where we can sleep! Oh, I wouldn't think that would be wrong, would it?" They were at home. She hastened to burrow among the pile of stewpans for the nine dollars, her week's salary, which she had hidden there. When she found that it was safe, she didn't care so much, after all. What difference would it have made if the money had been gone? Father staggered like a drunkard to one of the flimsy, straight, uncomfortable chairs. But he got himself up and tried to play on the mouth-organ a careless tune of grassy hills and a summer breeze. While he played he ridiculed himself for such agony over the loss of an overcoat, but his philosophizing didn't mean anything. He had lost the chance of finding work when he had lost the overcoat. He couldn't really think, and the feeble trickle of music had a tragic absurdity. He petulantly threw the mouth-organ on the bed, then himself slumped on the coverlet. His face was grayly hopeless, like ashes or dust or the snow of great cities. Mother had been brooding. She was only distantly conscious of his final collapse. She said, suddenly, bluntly: "Let's go away together. If we could only die while we are still together and have some nice things to remember--" Hers was the less conventional mind of the two. He protested--but it was a feeble mumble. The world had come to seem unreal; the question of leaving it rather unimportant. Much they talked, possibly for hours, but the talk was as confused as the spatter of furniture in that ill-lighted room--lighted by a gas-jet. All that they said was but repetition of her first demand.