We’re bound to win!”

They stood on the outside steps of the vast edifice beetling like a granite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory of life insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absently lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years’ familiarity; and so was the well-known street in its Saturday evening solitude. He asked himself, with prophetic homesickness, if it were an omen of what was to be. But he only said musingly: “A fortnightly. You know that didn’t work in England. The Fortnightly is published once a month now.”

“It works in France,” Fulkerson retorted. “The Revue des Deux Mondes is still published twice a month. I guess we can make it work in America—with illustrations.”

“Going to have illustrations?”

“My dear boy! What are you giving me? Do I look like the sort of lunatic who would start a thing in the twilight of the nineteenth century without illustrations? Come off!”

“Ah, that complicates it! I don’t know anything about art.” March’s look of discouragement confessed the hold the scheme had taken upon him.

“I don’t want you to!” Fulkerson retorted. “Don’t you suppose I shall have an art man?”

“And will they—the artists—work at a reduced rate too, like the writers, with the hopes of a share in the success?”

“Of course they will! And if I want any particular man, for a card, I’ll pay him big money besides. But I can get plenty of first-rate sketches on my own terms. You’ll see! They’ll pour in!”

“Look here, Fulkerson,” said March, “you’d better call this fortnightly of yours The Madness of the Half Moon; or Bedlam Broke Loose wouldn’t be bad! Why do you throw away all your hard earnings on such a crazy venture? Don’t do it!” The kindness which March had always felt, in spite of his wife’s first misgivings and reservations, for the merry, hopeful, slangy, energetic little creature trembled in his voice. They had both formed a friendship for Fulkerson during the week they were together in Quebec. When he was not working the newspapers there, he went about with them over the familiar ground they were showing their children, and was simply grateful for the chance, as well as very entertaining about it all. The children liked him too; when they got the clue to his intention and found that he was not quite serious in many of the things he said, they thought he was great fun. They were always glad when their father brought him home on the occasion of Fulkerson’s visits to Boston; and Mrs. March, though of a charier hospitality, welcomed Fulkerson with a grateful sense of his admiration for her husband. He had a way of treating March with deference, as an older and abler man, and of qualifying the freedom he used toward everyone with an implication that March tolerated it voluntarily, which she thought very sweet and even refined.

“Ah, now you’re talking like a man and a brother!” said Fulkerson. “Why, March, old man, do you suppose I’d come on here and try to talk you into this thing if I wasn’t morally, if I wasn’t perfectly, sure of success? There isn’t any if or and about it. I know my ground, every inch; and I don’t stand alone on it,” he added with a significance which did not escape March. “When you’ve made up your mind, I can give you the proof; but I’m not at liberty now to say anything more. I tell you it’s going to be a triumphal march from the word go, with coffee and lemonade for the procession along the whole line. All you’ve got to do is to fall in.” He stretched out his hand to March. “You let me know as soon as you can.”

March deferred taking his hand till he could ask, “Where are you going?”

“Parker House. Take the half past ten for New York tonight.”

“I thought I might walk your way.” March looked at his watch. “But I shouldn’t have time. Good-bye!”

He now let Fulkerson have his hand, and they exchanged a cordial pressure. Fulkerson started off at a quick, light pace. Half a block away he stopped, turned round, and seeing March still standing where he had left him, he called back joyously, “I’ve got the name!”

“What?”

“Every Other Week.”

“It isn’t bad.”

“Ta-ta!”

II

ALL THE WAY UP to the South End, March prolonged his talk with Fulkerson, and at his door in Nankeen Square he closed the parley with a plump refusal to go to New York on any terms. His daughter, Bella, was lying in wait for him in the hall, and she threw her arms round his neck with the exuberance of her fourteen years and with something of the histrionic intention of her sex.