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At the elevator door he met a fellow editor. "Hello, Bloom! Didn’t know you were down today. "

"I’m only trying it. I’m going to take a vacation for a while. "

"That’s right, man. You look like a ghost. "

"He hadn’t the courage to tell him he never expected to work there again. His step on the way home was firmer than it had been for weeks. In his white face his wife saw some subtle change.

"What is it, Robert?"

"Mate, let’s give it up. "

"What do you mean?"

"The struggle is too hard. I can’t stand it. I’m hungry for the country again. Let’s get out of this. "

"Where’ll we go?"

"Back to my native town–up among the Wisconsin hills and coulees. Go anywhere, so that we escape this pressure–it’s killing me. Let’s go to Bluff Siding for a year. It will do me good–may bring me back to life. I can do enough special work to pay our grocery bill; and the Merrill place–so Jack tells me–is empty. We can get it for seventy-five dollars for a year. We can pull through some way. "

"Very well, Robert. "

"I must have rest. All the bounce has gone out of me, Mate," he said with sad lines in his face. "Any extra work here is out of the question. I can only shamble around–an excuse for a man. "

The wife had ceased to smile. Her strenuous cheerfulness could not hold before his tragically drawn and bloodless face.

"I’ll go wherever you think best, Robert It will be just as well for the boys. I suppose there is a school there?"

"Oh, yes. At any rate, they can get a year’s schooling in nature. "

"Well–no matter, Robert; you are the one to be considered. " She had the self-sacrificing devotion of the average woman. She fancied herself hopelessly his inferior.

They had dwelt so long on the crumbling edge of poverty that they were hardened to its threat, and yet the failure of Robert’s health had been of the sort which terrifies. It was a slow but steady sinking of vital force. It had its ups and downs, but it was a downward trail, always downward. The time for self-deception had passed.

His paper paid him a meager salary, for his work was prized only by the more thoughtful readers of the Star.

In addition to his’ regular work he occasionally hazarded a story for the juvenile magazines of the East. In this way he turned the antics of his growing boys to account, as he often said to his wife.

He had also passed the preliminary stages of literary success by getting a couple of stories accepted by an Eastern magazine, and he still confidently looked forward to seeing them printed.

His wife, a sturdy, practical little body, did her part in the bitter struggle by keeping their little home one of the most attractive on the West Side, the North Side being altogether too high for them.

In addition, her sorely pressed brain sought out other ways of helping. She wrote out all her husband’s stories on the typewriter, and secretly she had tried composing others herself, the results being queer dry little chronicles of the doings of men and women, strung together without a touch of literary grace.

She proposed taking a large house and rerenting rooms, but Robert would not hear to it. "As long as I can crawl about we’ll leave that to others. "

In the month of preparation which followed he talked a great deal about their venture.

"I want to get there," he said, "just when the leaves are coming out on the trees. I want to see the cherry trees blossom on the hillside. The popple trees always get green first. "