Powell's eye brightened and his face glowed a deeper red; then the look died away as he said:
"Well, I made a mistake. I ought to have gone there."
Powell thought a moment, and Marley regretted having tempted him with an impossibility. He was relieved when Powell shook his head and said:
Powell, with something of the pathos of age and failure that was stealing gradually over him, begged Marley to come in and see him every day while he was at home.
"You see I've always kept your desk," he said, in a tone that apologized for a weakness he perhaps thought unmanly, "just as it was when you went away."
Marley thought cynically that Powell had kept everything else just as it was when he went away, but he was instantly ashamed of the thought, and ashamed, too, of the fact that he and Lavinia both considered even this little morning call a waste of time, and a sacrifice almost too great to be borne.
Powell went with Marley out into the street, and it gave him evident pride to walk by his side down Main Street and around the Square.
"I want them all to see you," he said frankly.
He made Marley go with him to the McBriar House and then to Con's Corner, and, in every place where men stopped him and shook Marley's hand and asked him how he was getting along, Powell took the responsibility of replying promptly:
"Look at him; how does he seem to be getting along?"
Powell found a delight that must have been keener than Marley's in Marley's fidelity to Chicago, expressed quite in the boastful frankness of the citizens of that city when abroad, though to Marley it seemed that he was putting it on them by doing so. He found them all, however, in a spirit of loyalty to Macochee that might easily have become combative.
"Well, little old Macochee's good enough for us, eh, Wade?" they would say.
Marley would not let them be ahead of him in praise of Macochee, and Powell himself softened enough to admit that old Ohio was a pretty good place to have come from.
When they suddenly encountered Carman in the street, Marley flushed with confusion, first for himself and then vicariously for Powell. But there was no escape from a situation that no doubt exaggerated itself to his sensitiveness, and he was soon allowing Carman to hold his hand in his right palm while with the other Carman solicitously held Marley's left elbow, and transfixed him with that left eye which still refused to react to light and shade.