A simpler soul than Fenton’s might have guessed at the trouble of this quiet household. Fenton read in it as well an omen of needful departure. He accepted the necessity with an acute sense of failure,—almost of injury. He had gained nothing but the bother of being loved. It was a bother, because it gave him an unwonted sense of responsibility. It seemed to fling upon all things a dusky shade of prohibition. Yet the matter had its brightness, too, if a man could but swallow his superstitions. He cared for Nora quite enough to tell her he loved her; he had said as much, with an easy conscience, to girls for whom he cared far less. He felt gratefully enough the cool vestment of tenderness which she had spun about him, like a web of imponderable silver; but he had other uses for his time than to go masquerading through Nora’s fancy. The defeat of his hope that Roger, like a testy old uncle in a comedy, would shower blessings and bank-notes upon his union with his cousin, involved the discomfiture of a secondary project; the design, namely, of borrowing five thousand dollars. The reader will smile; but such is the simplicity of “smart men.” He would content himself now with five hundred. In this collapse of his visions he fell a-musing upon Nora’s financial value. “Look here,” he said to her, with an air of heroic effort, “I see I’m in the way. I must be off.” “I am sorry, George,” said Nora, sadly. “So am I. I never supposed I was proud. But I reckoned without my host!” he said with a bitter laugh. “I wish I had never come. Or rather I don’t. It is worth it all to know you.” She began to question him soothingly about his projects and prospects; and hereupon, for once, Fenton bent his mettle to simulate a pathetic incapacity. He set forth that he was discouraged; the future was a blank. It was child’s play, attempting to do anything without capital. “And you have no capital?” said Nora, anxiously. Fenton gave a poignant smile. “Why, my dear girl, I’m a poor man!” “How poor?” “Poor, poor, poor. Poor as a rat.” “You don’t mean that you are penniless?” “What is the use of my telling you? You can’t help me. And it would only make you unhappy.” “If you are unhappy, I want to be!” This golden vein of sentiment might certainly be worked. Fenton took out his pocket-book, drew from it four bank-notes of five dollars each, and ranged them with a sort of mournful playfulness in a line on his knee. “That’s my fortune.” “Do you mean to say that twenty dollars is all you have in the world?” Fenton smoothed out the creases, caressingly, in the soiled and crumpled notes. “It’s a great shame to bring you down to a poor man’s secrets,” he said. “Fortune has raised you above them.” Nora’s heart began to beat. “Yes, it has. I have a little money, George. Some eighty dollars.” Eighty dollars! George suppressed a groan. “He keeps you rather low.”