Page:Quinby and Son (1925).pdf/182

 back to Sam and the store. . . and to his books.

But the time came when he sat before an open page and took no meaning from what was printed there. Tragedy brooded in his eyes. The bank balance had almost reached the vanishing point. Day by day he and Sam had gone deeper into a hole that seemed to have no bottom. As though to mock him, the business had always been on the point of gaining enough to be self-supporting, and had always been failing of the mark. A few more weeks, he knew, and there would be nothing left in the bank, nothing left in the cash drawer. And then. . ..

The picture froze him. The store closed, its little stock of furniture sold, the end of a dream. To be pointed out through the town as one who had had his chance and who could not seize its promise. To have Dolf Muller cry the dashing of his hopes through the corridors of the high school. To have his father tell him that he had done a foolish thing and, like all fools, had lost his money.

To a boy, whose world is just a succession of to-days, a disaster of the moment seems to bear the imprint of a calamity that will never lift. After the things that had happened to have to confess to his father that he had failed. . . . His face settled into a scowl, his jaw set, and suddenly he slammed shut the book and sat there with his fist upon it. He wouldn't give up.