And there was the money. Burke acted, for all the world, as if he thought she ate money, and ate it whether she was hungry or not, just to spite him. As if she didn't squeeze every penny till it fairly shrieked, now; and as if anybody could make ten dollars a week go further than she did! To be sure, at first she had been silly and extravagant, running up bills, and borrowing of Mrs. Jones, as she did. And of course she was a little unreasonable and childish about keeping that account-book. But that was only at the first, when she was quite ignorant and inexperienced. It was very different now. She kept a cash account, and most of the time it came right. How she wished she had an allowance, though! But Burke utterly refused to give her that. Said she'd be extravagant and spend it all the first day. As if she had not learned better than that by bitter experience! And as if anything could be worse than the way they were trying to get along now, with her teasing for money all the time, and him insisting on seeing the bills, and then asking how they _could_ manage to eat so many eggs, and saying he should think she used butter to oil the floors with. He didn't see how it could go so fast any other way! And wasn't he always telling her she did not manage right? And didn't he give her particular fits one day and an awful lecture on wastefulness, just because he happened to find half a loaf of mouldy bread in the jar? Just as if _he_ didn't spend something--and a good big something, too!--on all those cigars he smoked. Yet he flew into fits over a bit of mouldy bread of _hers_. To be sure, when she cried, he called himself a brute, and said he didn't mean it, and it was only because he hated so to have her pinching and saving all the time that it made him mad--raving mad. Just as if she was to blame that they did not have any money! But she was to blame, of course, in a way. If it had not been for her, he would be living at home with all the money he wanted. Sometimes it came to her with sickening force that maybe Burke was thinking that, too. Was he? Could it be that he was sorry he had married her? Very well--her chin came up proudly. He need not stay if he did not want to. He could go. But--the chin was not so high, now--he was all there was. She had nobody but Burke now. _Could_ it be-- She believed she would ask Dr. Gleason some time. She liked the doctor. He had been there several times now, and she felt real well acquainted with him. Perhaps he would know. But, after all, she was not going to worry. She did not believe that really Burke wished he had not married her. It was only that he was tired and fretted with his work. It would be better by and by, when he had got ahead a little. And of course he would get ahead. They would not always have to live like this! * * * * * It was in March that Burke came home to dinner one evening with a radiant face, yet with an air of worried excitement.