A Transaction in Hearts by Edgar Saltus — Read

The morrow was a blank. Gonfallon attended to his duties with the air of a somnambulist. In the morning at the meeting of the Church-Workers, in the afternoon at the Friendly Aid, the echo of Claire's laughter rippled through the tidings which it was his office to proclaim; and when the last rite had been performed he shook from him a young licentiate who fain would have passed a moment in Christian converse, and strode out into the gathering dusk and on to the outlying regions of the Park.

Above him was a sky of zinc. Beyond, to the west, the sun had slashed the horizon with belts of amber and agonizing green. The air was chill: he raised the collar of his coat, and as he hurried on unimpressed, unobservant even of the salutations of acquaintances whom he chanced to encounter, never yet had he felt more averse to his cloth. Yet did he relinquish it, what was there left? He was too old to begin life afresh: he lacked that energy which permits and even forces some men to turn from one calling to another; he had a wife to support, and down in a Massachusettsian village was his mother dependent on his wage. Truly it was easier to keep up a brave face and draw ten thousand per annum than to pull a wry one and advertise in the papers for an occupation suited to a man of scholarly attainments. If Bucholz had not gone under, there, indeed, would be a different guitar: he could have leaned on him, he could have entered, if need were, into his employ. As it was, instead of the opulence which Ruth might one day have inherited, it seemed not improbable that he would be called upon to contribute to Bucholz' support. Not later than the previous day a whisper, a breeze that loiters, had told him that his father-in-law passed his hours in extracting, and not painlessly, either, small loans from former companions of his banditti-days.