Page:In the Valley (1922).djvu/49

 to the scenes that crushed me. My friends have not much, but they will not see me starve. I will have to go back."

Marjorie pressed her lips together. "Once there was a man," she said; "who always had that fear of coming to want. Someone told me this story a long time ago. He was always thinking how dreadful it would be if he should ever get down to his last penny. That was always the way that he thought of it;—to get down to his last penny,—to come to the end. And he feared it so that he was all bound up by the thought, no matter what he tried to do;—and it hampered him in every way, and things began to go wrong, and then got quite bad, and then from bad to worse, and then from worse to worst; and at last one day he stood by the and took out of his pocket a coin and held it on the palm of his hand and looked at it. It was his last penny. And then he looked up and around over the beautiful country and the sunshine and the sea and the happy people; and he said:—'Well now, is this really the thing that I have been fearing all my life? Is this the thing that has been a burden and a nightmare for all of these years? Is this all that it is?' And then he laughed. It was so funny to find that he had actually reached that terrible point, and that it didn't really matter much after all;—that all of the terror had been in the thinking