Marley sighed in relief when he went up the steps of the Blair house that evening. Somehow he had got through the long, desolate day. He was sore from his great defeat, but the worst, at any rate, was over; the pang had been sharp, but now the pain had been dulled. He had spent the day in the office. Wade Powell had been in and out, but never once had he spoken of the clerkship, and Marley was too deep in humiliation to mention it. His one consolation was in the fact that he had never told any one of his prospect, not even his own mother; it had been a secret which he and Lavinia had shared luxuriously; though, as Marley now looked back on their joy, he realized that what had kept him from telling any one was a prudent skepticism, a lack of faith in the possibility of human happiness, an inherited dread of the calamity that stalks every joy.

Lavinia flung the hall door wide for him before he could ring the bell.

“What is the matter?”

“How did you know anything was?” he asked.

“Why,” she exclaimed, “I could tell the minute I heard your step. Tell me—what is it?”

Marley, ever sensitive to atmospheres, instantly felt the peace of the household. The glow from the living-room, a quiet voice speaking a commonplace word now and then, told him that Mrs. Blair was there with Connie and Chad, and he knew the children were at their lessons; he caught the faint odor of a cigar, and he knew that Judge Blair was in his library reading peacefully of the dead and silent past, whose men had left all their troubles in the leaves of printed books; all round him life was flowing on, unconsciously, and normally; the tumult and strife in his own soul were nothing to the world. All this flashed on him in an instant—and there was Lavinia, standing before him, her white brow knit in perplexity.

“Tell me,” she was saying, “what it is.”

“Well, I don’t get the job, that’s all.”

He felt a momentary savage pleasure in the pain he inflicted, justifying it in the thought that he eased his own suffering by giving it to another. Then as quickly he repented, and felt ashamed.

“Is that all?” she said. She had come close to him, smiling in her sympathy, and then lifting a hand to his forehead.

“Don’t do that,” she said, as if she would erase the scowl.

When they were seated he gave her the details of his meeting with Carman, and with the recital of his disappointment its sharpness was repeated. He leaned over, his elbows on his knees, and clutched his hair in his fists. For an instant a kind of relief came to Lavinia, a relief that a crisis in her life had been postponed, a crisis from which, instinctively, she had shrunk. Her life could go on for a while as it had always gone on; change, which mortals dread, was delayed. Then in another moment her sympathy went out to him; she was on the floor at his knees, her arms about him.

“Don’t, dear, don’t,” she pleaded. “Why, it is nothing. What does it matter? What does anything matter, so long as we have each other?”

She stroked his hair, she called him by all her endearing names. She tried to take his hands from his face, that she might get him to look at her. But he resisted.

“No,” he said. “I’m no good; I’m a failure; I’m worse than a failure. I’m a fool, a poor, weak, silly fool.”

“Hush, Glenn, hush!” she whispered, as if he were uttering blasphemies. “You must not, you must not!”

She shook him in a kind of fear.

“Look at me!” she said. “Look at me!”

He remained obdurate, slowly shaking his head from side to side.

“Look at me!” Lavinia repeated. “Don’t you see—don’t you see that—I love you?”

A change came over him, subtile, but distinct. Slowly he raised his head, and then he put his arms about her and held her close, and gradually a comfort stole over him,—a comfort so delicious that he felt himself hardly worthy, because he now saw that all through the day he had had a subconsciousness that it would come to him at evening, and that he had somehow exaggerated his own grief in order to make this certain comfort the sweeter when it came.

It seemed to Marley, after he and Lavinia had sat there for a while, that he had come out of some nightmare; sanity returned, things assumed once more their proper proportions and relations to each other. He found himself smiling, if not laughing just yet, and with Lavinia’s hope and confidence the future opened to him once more. Now and then, of course, his disappointment would roll over him as a great wave, and once he said ruefully:

“But think of the little home we were going to have!”

“But we’re going to have it,” Lavinia replied, smiling on him, “we’re going to have it, just the same!”

“But we’ll have to wait!”

“Well, we’re young,” said Lavinia, “and it won’t be so very long.”

“But I wanted it to be in the spring.”

“May be it will be, who knows?” Lavinia could smile in this reassurance, now that she knew it could not be in the spring.

They discussed their future in all its phases, with the hope that Lavinia could so easily inspire in him; Marley was to keep on with his law studies; there was nothing else now to do—unless something should turn up—there was always that hope.

“And it will, you’ll see,” said Lavinia.

They discussed, too, Carman and Wade Powell. Marley thought that Lavinia might return to her old severity with Powell; when he expected her to do this, he was preparing to defend Powell; when she did not, but was generous with him, and urged Marley to reflect that he had done all he had done out of a spirit of kindness, Marley was disposed to be severe with Powell himself. Carman, they agreed, had acted handsomely; they could not find cause to blame him.

“No,” said Marley, “he treated me all right; I believe he was really sorry for me.”

And then, at the thought of Carman’s having pity for him, his rebellion flamed up again.

“It’s humiliating, that’s what it is. Wade Powell had no business making a monkey of me in that way; though it doesn’t take much to make a monkey of me; I had the job almost completed myself, just waiting for some one to come along and put the finishing touches on. And Wade Powell did that!”

Marley spoke in the sardonic humor the wounded and beaten spirit likes to employ in dealing with itself. But Lavinia hushed him.

“You just can not talk that way about yourself, Glenn,” she declared with her finest air of ownership. “I won’t let you.”

“Well, it’s so humiliating,” he said.

“Why, no, it can’t be that,” Lavinia argued. “You can not feel humiliated. You have done nothing that need cause you any humiliation. We are the only ones who can humiliate ourselves; nothing but our own actions can humiliate us; no one else can.”

Lavinia had a smiling little triumph in her own philosophy, but she quickly compromised it by an inconsistency.

“Besides, no one else knows about it.”

“No,” Marley agreed thoughtfully, and without noticing her inconsistency. “No one else knows anything about it. We have that to be thankful for, anyway.”