"Thank you so much!" said Mary Houghton. "Henry, you mustn't say things before Edith! Suppose Eleanor had known her Little Dorrit?"

"She doesn't know anything; and she has nothing to say."

"Well, it might be worse," she encouraged him. "Suppose she were talkative?"

He nodded: "Yes; a dull woman is bad, and a talkative woman is bad; but a dull talkative woman is hell."

"My dear! I'm glad Edith's in bed. Well, I think I like her."



CHAPTER VI

But the time arrived when Mrs. Houghton was certain that she "liked" Maurice's wife. It would have come sooner if Eleanor's real sweetness had not been hidden by her tiresome timidity ... a thunderstorm sent her, blanched and panting, to sit huddled on her bed, shutters closed, shades drawn; she schemed not to go upstairs by herself in the dark; she was preoccupied when old Lion took them off on a slow, jogging drive, for fear of a runaway.

Everybody was aware of her nervousness. Until it bored him, Henry Houghton was touched by it;—probably there is no man who is so intelligent that the Clinging Vine makes no appeal to him. Mrs. Houghton was impatient with it. Edith, who could not understand fear in any form, tried, in her friendly little way, to reason Eleanor out of one panic or another. The servants joked among themselves at the foolishness of "Mrs. Maurice"; and the monosyllabic Johnny Bennett, when told of some of Eleanor's scares, was bored. "Let's play Indian," said Johnny.

It was only Maurice who found all the scares—just as he found the silences and small jealousies—adorable! The silences meant unspeakable depths of thought; the jealousies were a sign of love. The terrors called for his protecting strength! One of the unfair irrationalities of love is that it may, at first, be attracted by the defects of the beloved, and later repelled by them. Maurice loved Eleanor for her defects. Once, when he and Edith were helping Mrs. Houghton weed her garden, he stopped grubbing, and sat down in the gold and bronze glitter of coreopsis, to expatiate upon the exquisiteness of the defects. Her wonderful mind: "She doesn't talk, because she is always thinking; her ideas are way over my head!" Her funny timidity: "She wants me to take care of her!" Her love: "She's—it sounds absurd!—but she's jealous, because she's so—well, fond of me, don't you know, that she sort of objects to having people round. Did you ever hear of anything so absurd?"

"I certainly never did," his old friend said, dryly.

"Well, but"—Maurice defended his wife—"it's because she cares about me, don't you know? She—well, this is in confidence—she said once that she'd like to live on a desert island, just with me!"

"So would I," said Edith. Her mother laughed:

"Tell her desert islands have to have a 'man Friday'—to say nothing of a few 'women Thursdays'!"

Eleanor was, Maurice said, like music heard far off, through mists and moonlight in a dark garden, "full of—of—what are those sweet-smelling things, that bloom only at night?" (Mary Houghton looked fatigued.) "Well, anyway, what I mean is that she isn't like ordinary people, like me—"

"Or Johnny," Edith broke in, earnestly.

"Johnny? Gosh! Why, Mrs. Houghton, things that don't touch most human beings, affect her terribly. The dark, or thunderstorms, or—or anything, makes her nervous. You understand?"

Mrs. Houghton said yes, she understood, but she would leave the rest of the weeding to her assistants ... In the studio, dropping her dusty garden gloves on a fresh canvas lying on the table, she almost wept:

"Henry, it is too tragic! She is such a goose, and he is so silly about her! What shall we do?"

"I'll tell you what not to do—spoil my new canvas! If you really want my advice:—tell Eleanor that the greatest compliment any husband can pay his wife is contained in four words: 'You never bore me'; and that if she isn't careful Maurice will never compliment her."

Down in the garden, no one was aware of any tragedy. "When I go to Fern Hill," Edith said, "I'm going to tell all the girls I know Eleanor! I'm 'ordinary,' too, beside her. And so is mother."

Maurice agreed. "We are all crude, compared to her."

Edith sighed with joy; if she had had any inclination to be contemptuous of Eleanor's timidity, it vanished when it was pointed out to her that it was really a sign of the Bride's infinite superiority.... So the three Houghtons accepted—one with amused pity, and the other with concern, and the third with admiration of such super-refinement,—the fact that Eleanor was a coward. Yet if she had not been a coward, something she did would not have been particularly brave, nor would it have wrung from Mary Houghton the admission: "I like her!"

The conquering incident happened in August. The hut up in the woods meant to Maurice and Edith and Johnny that eager grasping at hardship with which Age has no sympathy, but which is the very essence of Youth. Within a week of her arrival at Green Hill, Eleanor (who did not like hardship;) had been carried off for a day of eating smoky food, cooked on a camp fire, and watching cloud shadows drift across the valley and up and over the hills; she had wondered, silently, why Maurice liked this very tiring sort of thing?—and especially why he liked to have Edith go along! "A child of her age is such a nuisance," Eleanor thought. But he did like it, all of it!—the fatigue, and the smoke, and the grubby food—and Edith!—he liked it so much that, just before the time set for their departure for Mercer—and the position in a real-estate office, which had been secured for Maurice—he said:

"Nelly, let's camp out up in the cabin for our last week, all by ourselves!"

Edith's face fell, and so, for that matter, did the Bride's. Edith said, "By yourselves? Not Johnny and me, too?" And Eleanor said, "At night? Oh, Maurice!"

"It will be beautiful," he said; "there'll be a moon next week, and we'll sit up there and look down into the valley, and see the treetops lift up out of the mist—like islands from the foam of 'faerylands forlorn'! You'll love it."

"I'm crazy about camping," said Edith, eagerly;—and waited for an invitation, which was not forthcoming. Instead, Maurice, talking his plans over with her, made it quite clear that her room was better than her company. It was Edith's first experience in being left out, and it sobered her a little; but she swallowed the affront with her usual good sense:

"I guess he likes Eleanor more 'an me, so, 'course, it's nice to be by himself with her."

The prospect of being "by themselves" for a week was deeply moving to Maurice. And even Eleanor, though she quaked at the idea of spiders or thunderstorms, thought of the passion of it with a thrill. "We'll be all alone!" she said to herself.

The morning that they started gypsying, everything was very impatient and delightful. The packing, the rolling up of blankets, the stowing of cooking utensils, the consulting of food lists to make sure nothing was being forgotten—all meant much tearing about and bossing; then came the loading the stuff into the light wagon, which, with old Lion, Mr. Houghton had offered to convey the campers (and a temporary Edith) up to the top of the mountain. Edith was, of course, frankly envious, but accepted the privilege of even a day in camp with humble gratitude.

"Rover and Johnny and I will come up pretty often, even if it's only for an hour, because Eleanor must not hurt her hands by washing dishes," she said, earnestly (still fishing for an invitation).

But Maurice only agreed, as earnestly: "No! Imagine Eleanor washing dishes! But I don't want you to stay all night, Buster," he told her, candidly; then he paused in his work, flung up his arms with a great breath of joyousness. "Great Scott!" he said. "I don't see why gypsies ever die!"

Edith felt an answering throb of ecstasy. "Oh, Maurice, I wish you and I were gypsies!" she said. She did not in the least resent his candor as to her presence during the week of camping; though just before they started her feelings really were a little hurt: it happened that in trying to help Eleanor pack, she was close enough to her to notice a thread on her hair; instantly, she put out a friendly and officious thumb and finger to remove it—at which Eleanor winced, and said, "Ouch!"

"I thought it was a white thread," Edith explained, abashed.

Eleanor said, sharply, "Please don't touch my hair!" which conveyed nothing to Edith except that the Bride—who instantly ran up to her room—"was mad." When she came back (the "thread" having disappeared) Edith was full of apologies.

"Awfully sorry I mussed your hair," she said.

She went up the mountain with them, walking on the hard grades, and trying to placate Eleanor by keeping a hand on Lion's bridle, so that she might feel sure he wouldn't run away. When at last, rather blown and perspiring, they reached the camp, Eleanor got out of the wagon and said she wanted to "help"; but Edith, still contrite about the "thread," said: "Not I'm not going to have you hurt your lovely hands!" In the late afternoon, having saved Eleanor's hands in every possible way, she left them, and thinking, without the slightest rancor, of the rough bliss she was not asked to share, went running down the mountain with Rover at her heels.

Eleanor, wondering at her willingness to take that long road home with only the lumbering old dog for company, was intensely glad to have her go.

"Girls of that age are so uninteresting," she told Maurice; "and now we'll be all by ourselves!"

"Yes; Adam and Eve," he said; "and twilight; and the world spread out like a garden! Do you see that glimmer over there to the left? That's the beginning of the river—our river!"

He had made her comfortable with some cushions piled against the trunk of a tree, and lighted a fire in a ring of blackened stones; then he brought her her supper, and ate his own on his knees beside her, watching eagerly for ways to serve her, laughing because she cringed when, from an overhanging bough, a spider let himself down upon her skirt, and hurrying to bring her a fresh cup of coffee, because an unhappy ant had scalded himself to death in her first cup. Afterward he would not let her "hurt her hands" by washing the dishes. When this was over, and the dusk was deepening, he went into the woods to the "lean-to" in which Lion was quartered, to see that the old horse was comfortable, but a minute later came crashing back through the underbrush, laughing, but provoked.

"That imp, Edith, didn't hitch him securely, and the old fellow has walked home, if you please—!"

"Lion—gone? Oh, what shall we do?"

"Ill pull the wagon down when I want to go back for food."

"Pull it?"

"Won't need much pulling! It will go down by itself. If I put you in it, I'll have to rope a log on behind as a brake, or it would run over me! I bet I give Edith a piece of my mind, when I get hold of her. But it doesn't really matter. I think I like it better to have not even Lion. Just you—and the stars. They are beginning to prick out," he said. He stretched himself on the ground beside her, his hands clasped under his head, and his happy eyes looking up into the abyss. "Sing, Star, sing!" he said. So she sang, softly:

"How many times do I love again? Tell me how many beads there are In a silver chain Of evening rain Unraveled from the tumbling main And threading the eye of a yellow star— So many times—

"It looks," she broke off, "a little black in the west? And—was that lightning?"

"Only heat lightning. And if it should storm,—I have you here, in my arms, alone!" He turned and caught her to him, and his mouth crushed hers. Her eyes closed, and her passion answered his, and all that he whispered. Yet while he kissed her, her eyes opened and she looked furtively beyond him, toward that gathering blackness.

They lay there together in the starlit dark, for a long time, his head on her breast. Sometimes she thrilled at his touch or low word, and sometimes she held his hand against her lips and kissed it—which made him protest—but suddenly he said, "By George! Nelly, I believe we are going to have a shower!"

Instantly she was alert with fright, and sat up, and looked down into the valley, where the heat lightning, which had been winking along the line of the hills, suddenly sharpened into a flash. "Oh!" she said, and held her breath until, from very far off, came a faint grumble of thunder. "Oh, Maurice!" she said, "it is horrible to be out here—if it thunders!"

"We won't be. Well go into the cabin, and we'll hear the rain on the roof, and the clash of the branches; and we'll see the lightning through the chinks—and I'll have you! Oh, Nelly, we shall be part of the storm!—and nothing in God's world can separate us."

But this time she could not answer with any elemental impulse; she had no understanding of "being part of the storm"; instead, she watched the horizon. "Oh!" she said, flinching. "I don't like it. What shall we do? Maurice, it is going to thunder!"

"I think I did feel a drop of rain," he said,—and held out his hand: "Yes, Star, rain! It's begun!" He helped her to her feet, gathered up some of the cushions, and hurried her toward the little shelter. She ran ahead of him, her very feet reluctant, lest the possible "snake" should curl in the darkness against her ankles; but once in the cabin, with a candle lighted, she could not see the lightning, so she was able to laugh at herself; when Maurice went out for the rest of the cushions, she charged him to hurry! "The storm will be here in a minute!" she called to him. And he called back:

"I'll only be a second!"

She stood in the doorway looking after him, and saw his figure outlined against the glimmer of their fire, which had already felt the spatter of the coming storm and was dying down; then, even as she looked, he seemed to plunge forward, and fall—the thud of that fall was like a blow on her throat! She gasped, "Maurice—" And again, "Maurice! Have you hurt yourself?"

He did not rise. A splash of rain struck her face; the mountain darkness was slit by a rapier of lightning, and there was a sudden violent illumination; she saw the tree and the cushions, and Maurice on the ground—then blackness, and a tremendous crash of thunder.

"Maurice!" she called. "Maurice!" The branches over the roof began to move and rustle, and there was a sudden downpour of rain; the camp fire went out, as if an extinguisher had covered it. She stood in the doorway for a breathless instant, then ran back into the cabin, and, catching the candle from the table, stepped out into the blackness; instantly the wind bore the little flame away!—then seemed to grip her, and twist her about, and beat her back into the house. In her terror she screamed his name; and as she did so, another flash of lightning showed her his figure, motionless on the ground.

"He is dead" she said to herself, in a whisper. "What shall I do?" Then, suddenly, she knew what to do: she remembered that she had noticed a lantern hanging on the wall near the door; and now something impelled her to get it. In the stifling darkness of the shack she felt her way to it, held its oily ring in her hand, thought, frantically, of matches, groped along toward the mantelpiece, stumbled over a chair—and clutched at the match box! Something made her open the isinglass slide, strike a match, and touch the blackened wick with the sulphurous sputter of flame,—the next moment, with the lighted lantern in her hand, she was out in the sheeting blackness of the rain!—running!—running!—toward that still figure by the deadened fire. Just before she reached it a twig rolled under her foot, and she said, "A snake,"—but she did not flinch. As she gained the circle of stones, a flash of lightning, with its instant and terrific crack and bellow of thunder, showed her a streak of blood on Maurice's face.... He had tripped and fallen, and his head had struck one of the blackened stones.

"He is dead," she said again, aloud. She put the lantern on the ground and knelt beside him; she had an idea that she should place her hand on his heart to see if he were alive. "He isn't," she told herself; but she laid her fingers, which were shaking so that she could not unfasten his coat, somewhere on his left side; she did not know whether there was any pulse; she knew nothing, except that he was "dead." She said this in a whisper, over and over. "He is dead. He is dead." The rain came down in torrents; the trees creaked and groaned in the wind; twice there were flashes of lightning and appalling roars of thunder. Maurice was perfectly still. The smoky glimmer of the lantern played on the thin streak of blood and made it look as though it was moving—trickling—

Then Eleanor began to think: "There ought to be a doctor...." If she left him, to bring help, he might bleed to death before she could get back to him. Instantly, as she said that, she knew that she did not believe that he was dead! She knew that she had hope. With hope, a single thought possessed her. She must take him down the mountain.... But how? She could not carry him;—she had managed to prop him up against her knee, his blond head lolling forward, awfully, on his breast—but she knew that to carry him would be impossible. And Lion was not there! "I couldn't have harnessed him if he were," she thought.

She was entirely calm, but her mind was working rapidly: The wagon was in the lean-to! Could she get him into it? The road was downhill.... Almost to Doctor Bennett's door....

Instantly she sprang to her feet and, with the pale gleam of the lantern zigzagging across the path, she ran back to the shed; just as she reached it, a glimmer of light fell on the soaked earth, and she looked up with a start and saw the moon peering out between two ragged, swiftly moving clouds; then all was black again—but the rain was lessening, and there had been no lightning for several minutes. "He will die; I must save him," she said, her lips stiff with horror. She lifted the shafts of the wagon, and gave a little pull; it moved easily enough, and, guiding it along the slight decline, she brought it to Maurice's side. There, looking at him, she said again, rigidly:

"He will die; I must save him."

As Henry Houghton said afterward, "It was impossible!—so she did it."

It took her more than an hour to do it, to pull and lift and shove the inert figure! Afterward she used to wonder how she had done it; wonder how she had given the final push, which got his sagging body up on to the floor of the wagon! It had strained every part of her;—her shoulder against his hips, her head in the small of his back, her hands gripping his heavy, dangling legs. She was soaking wet; her hair had loosened, and stray locks were plastered across her forehead. She grunted like a toiling animal.

It seemed as if her heart would crack with her effort, her muscles tear; she forgot the retreating rumble of the storm, the brooding, dripping forest stillness; she forgot even her certainty that he would die. She entirely forgot herself. She only knew—straining, gasping, sweating—that she must get the body—the dead body perhaps!—into the wagon. And she did it! Just as she did it, she heard a faint groan. Her heart stood still with terror, then beat frantically with joy.

He was alive!

She ran back to the cabin for the cushions he had saved from the rain, and pushed them under his head; then tied the lantern to the whip socket; then recalled what he had said about "roping a log on behind as a brake." "Of course!" she thought; and managed,—the splinters tearing her hands—to fasten a fairly heavy piece of wood under the rear axle, so that it might bump along behind the wagon as a drag. She pondered as she did these things why she should know so certainly how they must be done? But when they were done, she said, "Now!"... and went and stood between the shafts.

It was after midnight when the descent began. The moon rode high among fleecy clouds, but on either side of the road gulfs of darkness lay under motionless foliage. Sometimes the smoky light from the swaying lantern shone on a wet black branch, snapped by the gale and lying in the path, and Eleanor, seeing it, wedging her heels into the mud and sliding stones of the road, and straining backward between the shafts, would say, "A snake.... I must save Maurice." Sometimes she would hear, above the crunching of the wheels behind her, a faint noise in the undergrowth: a breaking twig, a brushing sound, as of a furtive footstep—and she would say, "A man.... I must save Maurice."

The yellow flame of the lantern was burning white in the dawn, as, holding back against the weight of the wagon—the palms of her bleeding hands clenched on the shafts, her feet slipping, her ankles twisted and wrenched—by and by, with the tears of physical suffering streaming down her face, she reached the foot of the mountain. The, thin, cool air of morning flowed about her in crystalline stillness; suddenly the sun tipped the green bowl of the world, and all at once shadows fell across the road like bars. They seemed to her, in her daze of terror and exhaustion, insurmountable: the road was level now, but she pulled and pulled, agonizingly, over those bars of nothingness; then one wheel sank into a rut, and the wagon came to a dead standstill; but at the same moment she saw ahead of her, among the trees, Doctor Bennett's dark, sleeping house. So, dropping the shafts, she went stumbling and running, to pound on the door, and gasp out:

"Come—help—Maurice—come—"

* * * * *

"I think," she said afterward, lying like a broken thing upon her bed, "I was able to do it, because I kept saying, 'I must save Maurice.' Of course, to save Maurice, I wouldn't mind dying."

"My dear, you are magnificent!" Mary Houghton said, huskily. Then she told her husband: "Henry, I like her! I never thought I would, but I do."

"I'll never say 'Mr. F.'s aunt' again!" he promised, with real contrition.

It was Eleanor's conquering moment, for everybody liked her, and everybody said she was 'magnificent'—except Maurice, who, as he got well, said almost nothing.

"I can't talk about it," was all he had to say, choking. "She's given her life for mine," he told the doctor.

"I hope not," Doctor Bennett said, "I hope not. But it will take months, Maurice, for her to get over this. As for saving your life, my boy, she didn't. She made things a lot more dangerous for you. She did the wrong thing—with greatness! You'd have come to, after a while. But don't tell her so."

"Well, I should say not!" Maurice said, hotly. "She'll never know that! And anyway, sir, I don't believe it. I believe she saved my life."

"Well, suit yourself," the doctor said, good-naturedly; "but I tell you one thing: whether she saved your life or not, she did a really wonderful thing—considering her temperament."

Maurice frowned: "I don't think her temperament makes any difference. It would have been wonderful for anybody."

"Well, suit yourself," Doctor Bennett said again; "only, if Edith had done it, say, for Johnny, who weighs nearly as much as you, I wouldn't have called it particularly wonderful."

"Oh, Edith," Maurice said, grinning; "no; I suppose not. I see what you mean." And to himself he added: "Edith is like an ox, compared to Star. Just flesh and blood. No nerves. No soul. Doctor Bennett was right. Eleanor's temperament does make it more wonderful."



CHAPTER VII

It was after this act of revealing and unnecessary courage, that the Houghton family entirely accepted Eleanor. There were a few days of anxiety about her, and about Maurice, too; for, though his slight concussion was not exactly alarming—yet, "Keep your shirt on," Doctor Bennett cautioned him; "don't get gay. And don't talk to Mrs. Curtis." So Maurice lay in his bed in another room, and entered, silently, into a new understanding of love, which, as soon as he was permitted to see Eleanor, he tried stumblingly to share with her.

Physically, she was terribly prostrated; but spiritually, feeding on those stumbling words, she rejoiced like a strong man to run a race! She saw no confession in the fact that everybody was astonished at what she had done; she was astonished herself. "I wasn't afraid!" she said, wonderingly.

"It was because you liked Maurice more than you were scared," Edith said; she offered this explanation the day that Maurice had been allowed to come across the hall, rather shakily, to adore his wife.

His first sight of her was a great shock.... The strain of that terrible night had blanched and withered her face; there were lines on her forehead that never left it.

Edith, sneaking in behind him, said under her breath: "Goodness! Don't she look old!"

She did. But as Maurice fell on his knees beside her, it seemed as if she drank youth from his lips. Under his kisses her worn face bloomed with joy.

"It was nothing—nothing," she insisted, stroking his thick hair with her trembling hand, and trying to silence his words of wondering worship.

"I was not worthy of it.... To think that you—" He hid his face on her shoulder.

Afterward, when he went back to his own room, she lay, smiling tranquilly to herself; her look was the look one sees on the face of a woman who, in that pallid hour after the supreme achievement of birth, has looked upon her child. She was entirely happy. From the open door of Maurice's room came, now and then, the murmur of Edith's honest little voice, or Maurice's chuckle. They were talking about her, she knew, and the happy color burned in her cheeks. When he came in for his second visit, late that afternoon, she asked him, archly, what he and Edith had been talking about so long in his room?

"I believe you were telling her what a goose I am about thunderstorms," she said.

"I was not!" he declared—and her eyes shone. But when she urged—

"Well, what were you talking about?" he couldn't remember anything but a silly story of Edith's hens. He repeated it, and Eleanor sighed; how could he be interested in anything so childish!

As it happened, he was not; he had scarcely listened to Edith. The only thing that interested Maurice now, was what Eleanor had done for him! Thinking of it, he brooded over her, silently, his cheek against hers, then Mrs. Houghton came in and banished him, saying that Eleanor must go to sleep; "and you and Edith must keep quiet!" she said.

He was so contrite that, tiptoeing to his own room, he told poor faithful Edith her voice was too loud: "You disturb Eleanor. So dry up, Skeezics!"

As he grew stronger, and was able to go downstairs, Edith felt freer to talk to him—for down on the porch, or out in the garden, her eager young voice would not reach those languid ears. Then, suddenly, all her chances to talk stopped: "What's the matter with Maurice?" she pondered, crossly; "he's backed out of helping me. Why can't he go on shingling the chicken coop?" For it was while this delightful work was under way that it, and "talk," came to an abrupt end.

The shingling, begun joyously by the big boy and the little girl on Monday, promised several delightfully busy mornings.... Of course the setting out for Mercer had been postponed; there was no possibility of moving Eleanor for the present; so Maurice's "business career," as he called it, with grinning pomposity, had to be delayed—Eleanor turned white at the mere suggestion of convalascing at Green Hill without him! Consequently Maurice, when not worshiping his wife, had nothing to do, and Edith had seized the opportunity to make him useful.... "We'll shingle my henhouse," she had announced. Maurice liked the scheme as much as she did. The September air, the smell of the fresh shingles, the sitting with one leg doubled under you, and the other outstretched on the hot slope of the roof, the tap-tapping of the hammers, the bossing of Edith, the trying to talk of Eleanor, and thunderstorms, while you hold eight nails between your lips; then the pause while Edith climbs down the ladder and runs to the kitchen for hot cookies; all these things would be a delightful occupation for any intelligent person!

"It'll take three mornings to do it," Edith said, importantly; and Maurice said:

"It will, because you keep putting the wrong end up! I wish Eleanor was well enough to do it," he said—and then burst into self-derisive chuckles: "Imagine Eleanor straddling that ridgepole! It would scare her stiff!"

It was after this talk that Maurice "backed out" on the job—but Edith never knew why. She saw no connection between the unfinished roof, and the fact that that same afternoon, sitting on the floor in the Bride's room, she had, in her anxiety to be entertaining, repeated Maurice's remark about the ridgepole. Eleanor, who had had an empty morning, listening to the distant tapping of hammers, had drooped a weary lip.

"I should hate it. Horrid, dirty work!"

"Oh no! It's nice, clean work," Edith corrected her.

"But you wouldn't like it, of course," she said, with satisfaction; "you'd be scared! You're scared of everything, Maurice says. You were scared to death, up on the mountain."

Eleanor was silent.

"He thinks it's lovely for you to be scared; it's funny about Maurice," said Edith, thoughtfully; "he doesn't like it when I'm scared—not that I ever am, now, but I used to be when I was a child."

The color flickered on Eleanor's cheeks: "Edith, I'll rest now," she said; her voice broke.

Edith looked at her, open-mouthed. "Why, Eleanor!" she said; "what's the matter? Are you mad at anything? Have you a stomachache? I'll run for mother!"

"There's nothing the matter. But—but I wish you'd tell Maurice to come and speak to me."

Edith tore downstairs, and out of the front door: "Maurice! Where are you?"—then, catching sight of him, reading and smoking in a hammock slung between two of the big columns on the east porch, she rushed at him, and pulled him to his astonished feet. "Eleanor wants you! Something's the matter, and—"

Before she could finish, Maurice was tearing upstairs, two steps at a time....

And so it was that Edith, sulkily, worked on the roof by herself.

Yet Maurice had not entirely "backed out." ... The very next morning, before Edith was awake, he had gone out to the henhouse, and, alone, done more than his share of the shingling.

"But, Maurice, why didn't you wake me?" Edith protested, when she discovered what he had done. "I'd have gone out, too!"

"I liked doing it by myself," Maurice evaded.

And for five minutes Edith was sulky again. "He puts on airs, 'cause he's married! Well, I don't care. He can shingle the whole roof by himself if he wants to! I don't like married men, anyhow."

The married man had, indeed, wanted to be by himself—to put the nails in his mouth, and to sit on the cold, slippery shingles in the gray September morning, and to tap-tap-tap—and think, and think.

But he didn't like his thoughts very well....

He thought how he had rushed upstairs, terrified lest Eleanor was fainting or had a "stomachache," or something—and found her sitting up in bed, her cheeks red and glazed with tears, her round, full chin quivering. He thought how he had tried to make out what she was driving at about Edith, and the chicken coop, and the ridgepole!

"You told Edith I was scared!"

Maurice's bewilderment was full of stumbling questions: "Told Edith? When? What?"

And as she said "when" and "what," ending with, "You said I am scared!" Maurice could only say, blankly. "But my darling, you are!"

"You may think I am a fool, but to tell Edith so—"

"But Great Scott! I didn't!"

"I won't have you talking me over with Edith; she's a child! It was just what you did when you danced three times with that girl who said—Edith is as rude as she was!—and she's a child. How can you like to be with a child?" Of course, it was all her fear of Youth,—but Eleanor did not know that; she thought she was hurt at the boy's neglect. Her face, wet with tears, was twitching, her voice—that lovely voice!—was shrill in his astonished ears....

Maurice, on the sloping roof, in the chill September dawn, his fingers numb on the frosty nails, stopped hammering, and leaned his chin on his fist, and thought: "She's sick. She almost killed herself to save me; so her nerve has all gone. That's why she talked—that way." He put a shingle in its place, and planted a nail; "it was because she was scared that what she did was so brave! I couldn't make her see that the more scared she was, the braver she was. It wouldn't have been brave in that gump, Edith, without a nerve in her body. But why is she down on Edith? I suppose she's a nuisance to a person with a wonderful mind like Eleanor's. Talks too much. I'll tell her to dry up when she's with Eleanor." And again he heard that strange voice: "You like to talk to a child."

Maurice, pounding away on Edith's roof, grew hot with misery, not because it was so terrible to have Eleanor angry with him; not even because he had finally got mad, and answered back, and said, "Don't be silly!" The real misery was something far deeper than this half-amused remorse. It was that those harmless, scolding words of his held a perfectly new idea: he had said, "Don't be silly." Was Eleanor silly?

Now, to a man whose feeling about his wife has been a sort of awe, this question is terrifying. Maurice, in his boy's heart, had worshiped in Eleanor, not just the god of Love, but the love of God. And was she—silly? No! Of course not! He pounded violently, hit his thumb, put it into his mouth, then proceeded, mumblingly, to bring his god back from the lower shrine of a pitying heart, to the high alter of a justifying mind: Eleanor was ill.... She was nervous.... She was an exquisite being of mist and music and courage and love! So of course she was sensitive to things ordinary people did not feel. Saying this, and fitting the shingles into place, suddenly the warm and happy wave of confident idealism began to flood in upon him, and immediately his mind as well as his heart was satisfied. He reproached himself for having been scared lest his star was just a common candle, like himself. He had been cruel to judge her, as he might have judged her had she been well—or a gump like Edith! For had she been well, she would not have been "silly"! Had she been well—instead of lying there in her bed, white and strained and trembling, all because she had saved his life, harnessing herself to that wagon, and bringing him, in the darkness, through a thousand terrors—nonexistent, to be sure, but none the less real—to safety and life! Oh, how could he have even thought the word "silly"? He was ashamed and humble; never again would he be cross to her! "Silly? I'm the silly one! I'm an ass. I'll tell her so! I don't suppose she'll ever forgive me. She said I 'didn't understand her'; well, I didn't! But she'll never have cause to say it again! I understand her now," Then, once more, he thought, frowning, "But why is she so down on Edith?"

That Eleanor's irritation was jealousy—not of Edith, but of Edith's years—never occurred to him. So all he said was, "She oughtn't to be down on Edith; she has always appreciated her!" Edith had never said that Eleanor was "silly"! But so long as it bothered Eleanor (being nervous) to have the imp round, he'd tell her not to be a nuisance. "You can say anything to Skeezics; she has sense. She understands."

But all the same, Maurice shingled his part of the henhouse before breakfast.

Maurice did not call Eleanor "silly" again for a long time. There was always—when she was unreasonable—the curbing memory that her reasonableness had been shaken by that assault of darkness and fear, and the terrible fatigue of saving his robust young life. Furthermore, Doctor Bennett—telling Henry Houghton that Eleanor had done the worst possible thing, "magnificently"—told Maurice she had "nervous prostration,"—a cloaking phrase which kindly doctors often give to perplexed husbands, so that the egotism of sickly wives may be covered up! So Maurice, repeating to himself these useful words, saw only ill health, not silliness, in Eleanor's occasional tears. It was a week after the shingling of the henhouse, that, leaving her to recuperate still further at Green Hill, he started in on his job of "office boy"—his jocose title for his position in the real-estate office in Mercer. Eleanor did not want to be left, and said so, wistfully.

"I'll come up for Sundays," Maurice comforted her, tenderly.

On these weekly visits the Houghtons were impressed by his tenderness; he played solitaire with his wife by the hour; he read poetry to her until she fell asleep; and he told her everything he had done and every person he had seen, while he was away from her! But the rest of the household didn't get much enjoyment out of Eleanor. Even the adoring Edith had moments when admiration had to be propped up by Doctor Bennett's phrase. As, for instance, on one of Maurice's precious Sundays, he and she and Johnny Bennett and Rover and old Lion climbed up to the cabin to make things shipshape before closing the place for the winter.

"You'll be away from me all day," Eleanor said, and her eyes filled.

Maurice said he hated to leave her, but he had always helped Edith on this closing-up job.

"Oh, well; go, if you want to," Eleanor said; "but I don't see how you can enjoy being with a perfect child, like Edith!"

Maurice went—not very happily. But it was such a fine, tingling day of hard work, in a joyous wind, with resulting appetites, and much yelling at each other—"Here, drop that!" ... "Hurry up, slow poke!"—that he was happy again before he knew it. After the work was over they had a lazy hour before the fire, their eyes stinging with smoke which seemed to envelop them, no matter on which side they sat; an hour in which Rover drowsed at Maurice's feet, and Johnny, in spectacles, read A Boy's Adventures in the Forests of Brazil, and Edith gabbled about Eleanor....

"Oh, I wish I was married," Edith said; "I'd just love to save my husband's life!"

Maurice said little, except to ask Johnny if he had got to such and such a place in the Adventures, or to assent to Edith's ecstasies; but once he sighed, and said Eleanor was awfully pulled down by that—that night.

"I should think," Edith said, "you'd feel she'd just about died for you, like people in history who died for each other."

"I do," Maurice said, soberly.

When they drove home in the dusk, Maurice singing, loudly; Edith, on the front seat of the wagon, snuggling against him; Johnny standing up, balancing himself by holding on to their shoulders, and old Rover jogging along on the footpath,—they were all in great spirits, until a turn in the road showed them Eleanor, sitting on a log, looking rather white.

"Suffering snakes!" said Maurice, breaking off in the middle of a word. Before Lion could quite stop, he was at his wife's side. "Eleanor! How did you get here? ... You walked? Oh, Star, you oughtn't to have done such a thing!"

"I was frightened about you. It was so late. I was afraid something had happened. I came to look for you."

Edith and Johnny looked on aghast; then Edith called out: "Why, Eleanor! I wouldn't let anything happen to Maurice!"

Maurice, kneeling beside his wife, had put his arms around her and was soothing her with all sorts of gentlenesses: "Dear, you mustn't worry so! Nelly, don't cry; why, darling, we were having such a good time, we never noticed that it was getting late ..."

"You forgot me," Eleanor said; "as long as you had Edith, you never thought how I might worry!" She hid her face in her hands.

Maurice came back to the wagon; "Edith," he said, in a low voice, "would you and Johnny mind getting out and walking? I'll bring Eleanor along later. I'm sorry, but she's—she's tired."

Edith said in a whisper, "'Course not!" Then, without a look behind her at the crying woman on the log, and the patient, mortified boy bending over her, she, and the disgusted and more deliberate Johnny, ran down the road into the twilight. Edith was utterly bewildered. With her inarticulate consciousness of the impropriety of emotion, naked, in public! was the shyness of a child in meeting a stranger—for that crying woman was practically a stranger. She wasn't the Bride—silent and lovely! At Johnny's gate she said, briefly, "'Night!" and went on, running—running in the dusk. When she reached the house, and found her father and mother on the east porch, she was breathless, which accounted for her brevity in saying that Maurice and Eleanor were coming—and she was just starved! In the dining room, eating a very large supper, she listened for the wheels of the wagon and reflected: "Why was Eleanor mad at me? She was mad at Maurice, too. But most at me. Why?" She took an enormous spoonful of sliced peaches, and stared blankly ahead of her.

Ten minutes later, hearing wheels grating on the gravel at the front door, and Maurice's voice, subdued and apologetic, she pushed her chair away from the table, rushed through the pantry and up the back stairs. She didn't know why she fled. She only knew that she couldn't face Eleanor, who would sit with Maurice while he bolted a supper for which—though Edith didn't know it!—all appetite had gone. In her room in the ell, Edith shut the door, and, standing with her back against it, tried to answer her own question:

"Why was Eleanor mad?" But she couldn't answer it. Jealousy, as an emotion, in herself or anybody else, was absolutely unknown to her. She had probably never even heard the word—except in the Second Commandment, or as a laughing reproach to old Rover—so she really did not know enough to use it now to describe Eleanor's behavior. She only said, "Maybe it's the nervous prostration? Well, I don't like her very much. I'm glad she won't be at Fern Hill when I go there." To be a Bride—and yet to cry before people! "Crying before people," Edith said, "is just like taking off all your clothes before people—I don't care how bad her nervous prostration is; it isn't nice! But why is she mad at me? That isn't sense."

You can't run other people's feelings to cover, and try to find their cause, without mental and moral development; all this analysis lessened very visibly Edith's childishness; also, it made her rather rudely cold to Eleanor, whose effort to reinstate herself in the glories of the little girl's imagination only resulted in still another and entirely new feeling in Edith's mind—contempt.

"If she had a right to be mad at me yesterday—why isn't she mad to-day?" Edith reasoned.

Eleanor was quick to feel the contempt. "I don't care for Edith," she told Maurice, who looked surprised.

"She's only a child," he said.

Edith seemed especially a child now to Maurice, since he had embarked on his job at Mercer. Not only was she unimportant to him, but, in spite of his mortification at that scene on the road, his Saturday-night returns to his wife were blowing the fires of his love into such a glory of devotion, that Edith was practically nonexistent! His one thought was to take Eleanor to Mercer. He wanted her all to himself! Also, he had a vague purpose of being on his dignity with a lot of those Mercer people: Eleanor's aunt, just back from Europe; Brown and Hastings—cubs! But below this was the inarticulate feeling that, away from the Houghtons, especially away from Edith, he might forget his impulse to use—for a second time—that dreadful word "silly."

So, as the 20th of October approached—the day when they were to go back to town—he felt a distinct relief in getting away from Green Hill. The relief was general. Edith felt it, which was very unlike Edith, who had always sniffled (in private) at Maurice's departure! And her father and mother felt it:

"Eleanor's mind," Henry Houghton said, "is exactly like a drum—sound comes out of emptiness!"

"But Maurice seems to like the sound," Mrs. Houghton reminded him; "and she loves him."

"She wants to monopolize him," her husband said; "I don't call that love; I call it jealousy. It must be uncomfortable to be jealous," he ruminated; "but the really serious thing about it is that it will bore any man to death. Point that out to her, Mary! Tell her that jealousy is self-love, plus the consciousness of your own inferiority to the person of whom you are jealous. And it has the same effect on love that water has on fire. My definition ought to be in a dictionary!" he added, complacently.

"What sweet jobs you do arrange for me!" she said; "and as for your definition, I can give you a better one—and briefer: 'Jealousy is Human Natur'! But I don't believe Eleanor's jealous, Henry; she's only conscious, poor girl! of Maurice's youth. But there is something I am going to tell her...."

She told her the day before the bridal couple (Edith still reveled in the phrase!) started for Mercer. "Come out into the orchard," Mary Houghton called upstairs to Eleanor, "and help me gather windfalls for jelly."

"I must pack Maurice's things," Eleanor called over the banisters, doubtfully; "he's a perfect boy about packing; he put his boots in with his collars."

"Oh, come along!" said Mrs. Houghton. And Eleanor yielded, scolding happily while she pinned her hat on before the mirror in the hall.

In the orchard they picked up some apples, then sat down on the bleached stubble of the mowed hillside and looked over at the dark mass of the mountain, behind which a red sun was trampling waist deep through leaden clouds. "How can I bring it in?" Mrs. Houghton thought; "it won't do to just throw a warning at her!"

But she didn't have to throw it; Eleanor invited it. "I'm glad we're going to the hotel, just at first," she said; "Auntie says I don't know anything about keeping house, and I get worried for fear I won't make Maurice comfortable. I tell him so all the time!"

"I wouldn't put things into his head, Eleanor," Mrs. Houghton said (beginning her "warning"); "I mean things that you don't want him to feel. I remember when my first baby was coming—the little boy we lost—" she stopped and bit her lip; the "baby" had been gone for nearly twenty years, but he was still her little boy—"I was very forlorn, and I couldn't do anything, or go anywhere; and Henry stayed at home with me like a saint. Well, I told my father that I had told Henry it was hard on him to 'sit at home with an invalid wife.' And father said, 'If you tell him so often enough, he'll agree with you,' There's a good deal in that, Eleanor?"

"I suppose there is," Maurice's wife said, vaguely.

"So, if I were you," Mrs. Houghton said, still feeling her way, "I wouldn't give him the idea that you are any—well, older than he is. A wife might be fifty years older than her husband, and if her spirit was young, years wouldn't make a bit of difference!"

Eleanor took this somewhat roundabout advice very well. "The only thing in the world I want," she said, simply, "is to make him happy."

They went back to the house in silence. But that night Eleanor paused in putting some last things into her trunk, and, going over to Maurice, kissed his thick hair. "Maurice," she said, "are you happy?"

"You bet I am!"

"You haven't said so once to-day."

"I haven't said I'm alive," he said, grinning. "Oh, Star, won't it be wonderful when we can go away from the whole caboodle of 'em, and just be by ourselves?"

"That's what I want!" she said; "just to be alone with you. I wish we could live on a desert island!..."

Down in the studio, Mr. Houghton, smoking up to the fire limit a cigar grudgingly permitted by his wife ("It's your eighth to-day," she reproached him), Henry Houghton, listening to his Mary's account of the talk in the orchard, told her what he thought of her: "May you be forgiven! Your intentions are doubtless excellent, but your truthfulness leaves something to be desired: 'Years won't make any difference'? Mary! Mary!"

But she defended herself: "I mean, 'years' can't kill love—the highest love—the love that grows out of, and then outgrows, the senses! The body may be just an old glove—shabby, maybe; but if the hand inside the glove is alive, what real difference does the shabbiness make? If Eleanor's mind doesn't get rheumatic, and if she will forget herself!—they'll be all right. But if she thinks of herself—" Mary Houghton sighed; her husband ended her sentence for her:

"She'll upset the whole kettle of fish?"

"What I'm afraid of," she said, with a troubled look, "is that you are right:—she's inclined to be jealous, I saw her frown when he was playing checkers with Edith. I wanted to tell her, but didn't dare to, that jealousy is as amusing to people who don't feel it, as it is undignified in people who do."

"My darling, you are a brute," said Mr. Houghton; "I have long suspected it, in re tobacco. As for Eleanor, I would never have such cruel thoughts! I belong to the gentler sex. I would merely refer her to Mr. F.'s aunt."



CHAPTER VIII

They reached Mercer in the rainy October dusk. It was cold and raw, and a bleak wind blew up the river, which, with its shifting film of oil, bent like a brown arm about the grimy, noisy town. The old hotel, with its Doric columns grimed with years of smoky river fogs, was dark, and smelled of soot; and the manners of the waiters and chambermaids would have set Eleanor's teeth on edge, except that she was so absorbed in the thrill of being back under the roof which had sheltered them in those first days of bliss.

"Do you remember?" she said, significantly.

Maurice, looking after suitcases and hand bags, said, absently, "Remember what?" She told him "what" and he said: "Yes. Where do you want this trunk put, Eleanor?"

She sighed; to sentimentalize and receive no response in kind, is like sitting down on a chair which isn't there. After dinner, when she and Maurice came up to their room, which had fusty red hangings and a marble-topped center table standing coldly under a remote chandelier, she sighed again, for Maurice said that, as for this hole of a hotel, the only thing he thought of, was how soon they could get out of it! "I can get that little house I told you about, only it's rather out of the way. Not many of your kind of people 'round!"

She knelt down beside him, pushing his newspaper aside and pressing her cheek against his. "That doesn't make any difference!" she said; "I'm glad not to know anybody. I just want you! I don't want people."

"Neither do I," Maurice agreed; "I'd have to shell out my cigars to 'em if they were men!"

"Oh, is that your reason?" she said, laughing.

"Say, Star, would you mind moving? I was just reading—"

She rose, and, going over to the window, stood looking out at the streaming rain in one of those empty silences which at first had been so alluringly mysterious to him. She was waiting for his hand on her shoulder, his kiss on her hair—but he was immersed in his paper. "How can he be interested about football, now, when we're alone?" she thought, wistfully. Then, to remind him of lovelier things, she began to sing, very softly:

"Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers? 0 sweet content! To add to golden numbers, golden numbers, O sweet content!—0 sweet, O sweet content—"

He dropped his paper and listened—and it seemed as if music made itself visible in his ardent, sensitive face! After a while he got up and went over to the window, and kissed her gently ...

Maurice was very happy in these first months in Mercer. The Weston office liked him—and admired him, also, which pleased his young vanity!—though he was jeered at for an incorrigible and alarming truthfulness which pointed out disadvantages to possible clients, but which—to the amazement of the office—frequently made a sale! As a result he acquired, after a while, several small gilt hatchets, presented by the "boys," and also the nickname of "G. Washington." He accepted these tributes with roars of laughter, but pointed to results: "I get the goods!" So, naturally, he liked his work—he liked it very much! The joy of bargaining and his quick and perhaps dangerously frank interest in clients as personalities, made him a most beguiling salesman; as a result he became, in an astonishingly short time, a real force in the office; all of which hurried him into maturity. But the most important factor in his happiness was his adoration of Eleanor. He was perfectly contented, evening after evening in the hotel, to play her accompaniments (on a rented piano), read poetry aloud, and beat her at solitaire. Also, she helped him in his practicing with a certain sweet authority of knowledge, which kept warm in his heart the sense of her infinite superiority. So when, later, they found a house, he entered very gayly upon the first test of married life—house furnishing! It was then that his real fiber showed itself. It is a risky time for all husbands and wives, a time when it is particularly necessary to "consider the stars"! It needs a fine sense of proportion as to the value, relatively, of peace and personal judgment, to give up one's idea in regard, say, to the color of the parlor rug. Maurice's likes and dislikes were emphatic as to rugs and everything else,—but his sense of proportion was sound, so Eleanor's taste,—and peace,—prevailed. It was good taste, so he really had nothing to complain of, though he couldn't for the life of him see why she picked out a picture paper for a certain room in the top of the house! "I thought I'd have it for a smoking room," he said, ruefully; "and a lot of pink lambs and green chickens cavorting around don't seem very suitable. Still, if you like it, it's all right!" The memory of the night on the mountain, when Eleanor gave all she had of strength and courage and fear and passion to the saving of his life—made pink lambs, or anything else, "all right"! When the house-furnishing period was over, and they settled down, the "people" Eleanor didn't want to see, seemed to have no particular desire to see them; so their solitude of two (and Bingo, who barked whenever Maurice put his arms around Eleanor) was not broken in upon—which made for domestic, even if stultifying, content. But the thing that really kept them happy during that first rather dangerous year, was the smallness of their income. They had very little money; even with Eleanor's six hundred, it was nearer two thousand dollars than three, and that, for people who had always lived in more or less luxury, was very nearly poverty;—for which, of course, they had reason, so far as married happiness went, to thank God! If there are no children, it is the limited income which can be most certainly relied upon to provide the common interest which welds husband and wife together. This more or less uncomfortable, and always anxious, interest, generally develops in that critical time when the heat of passion has begun to cool, and the friction of the commonplace produces a certain warmth of its own. These are the days when conjugal criticism, which has been smothered under the undiscriminating admiration of first love, begins to raise its head—an ugly head, with a mean eye, in which there is neither imagination nor humor. When this criticism begins to creep into daily life, and the lure of the bare shoulder and perfumed hair lessens—because they are as assured as bread and butter!—it is then that this saving unity of purpose in acquiring bread and butter comes to the rescue.

It came to the rescue of Maurice and Eleanor; they had many welding moments of anxiety on his part, and eager self-sacrifice on her part; of adding up columns of figures, with a constantly increasing total, which had to be subtracted from a balance which decreased so rapidly that Eleanor felt quite sure that the bank was cheating them! Of course they did not appreciate the value of this blessed young poverty—who of us ever appreciates poverty while we are experiencing it? We only know its value when we look back upon it! But they did—or at least Eleanor did—appreciate their isolation, never realizing that no human life can refresh another unless it may itself drink deep of human sympathies and hopes. Maurice could take this refreshment through business contacts; but, except for Mrs. O'Brien, and her baby grandson, Don, Eleanor's acquaintances in Mercer had been limited to her aunt's rather narrow circle.

When Mrs. Newbolt got back from Europe, Maurice was introduced to this circle at a small dinner given to the bride and groom to indicate family forgiveness. The guests were elderly people, who talked politics and surgical operations, and didn't know what to say to Maurice, whose blond hair and good-humored blue eyes made him seem distressingly young. Nor did Maurice know what to say to them.

"I'd have gone to sleep," he told Eleanor, in exploding mirth, on their way home, "if it hadn't been that the food was so mighty good! I kept awake, in spite of that ancient dame who hashed up the Civil War, just to see what the next course would be!"

It was about this time that Maurice began to show a little longing for companionship (outside the office) of a kind which did not remember the Civil War. His evenings of solitaire and music were awfully nice, but—

"Brown and Hastings are in college," he told his wife; "and Mort's on a job at his father's mills. I miss 'em like the devil."

"I don't want anyone but you," she said, and the tears started to her eyes; he asked her what she was crying about, and she said, "Oh, nothing." But of course he knew what it was, and he had to remind himself that "she had nervous prostration"; otherwise that terrible, hidden word "silly" would have been on his lips.

Eleanor, too, had a hidden word; it was the word "boy." It was Mrs. Newbolt who thrust it at her, in those first days of settling down into the new house. She had come in, waddling ponderously on her weak ankles, to see, she said, how the young people were getting along: "At least, one of you is young!" Mrs. Newbolt said, jocosely. She was still puffing from a climb upstairs, to find Eleanor, dusty and disheveled, in a little room in the top of the house. She was sitting on the floor in front of a trunk, with Bingo fast asleep on her skirt.

"What's this room to be?" said Mrs. Newbolt; then looked at the wall paper, gay with prancing lambs and waddling ducks, and Noah's Ark trees. "What! a nursery?" said Mrs. Newbolt; "do you mean—?"

"No," Eleanor said, reddening; "oh no! I only thought that if—"

"You are forehanded," said Mrs. Newbolt, and was silent for almost a minute. The vision of Eleanor choosing a nursery paper, for little eyes (which might never be born!) to look upon, touched her. She blinked and swallowed, then said, crossly: "You're thinner! For heaven's sake don't lose your figger! My dear grandmother used to say—I can see her now, skimmin' milk pans, and then runnin' her finger round the rim and lickin' it. She was a Dennison. I've heard her say to her daughters, I'd rather have you lose your virtue than lose your figger'; and my dear grandfather—your great-grandfather—wore knee breeches; he said—well, I suppose you'd be shocked if I told you what he said? He said, 'If a gal loses one, she—' No; I guess I won't tell you. Old maids are so refined! He wasn't an old maid, I can tell you! I brought a chocolate drop for Bingo. Have you a cook?"

Eleanor, gasping with the effort to keep up with the torrent, said, "Yes; but she doesn't know how to do things."

Mrs. Newbolt raised pudgy and protesting hands. "Get somebody who can do things! Come here, little Bingo! Eleanor, if you don't feed that boy, you'll lose him. I remember puffectly well hearin' my dear father say, 'If you want to catch a man's heart, set a trap in his stomach.' Bingo! Bingo!" (The little dog, standing on his hind legs, superciliously accepted a chocolate drop—then ran back to Eleanor.) "Maurice will be a man one of these days, and a man can't live on love; he wants 'wittles and drink.' When I married your uncle Thomas, my dear father said, 'Feed him—and amuse him.' So I made up my mind on my weddin' day to have good food and be entertainin'. And I must say I did it! I fed your dear uncle, and I talked to him, until he died." She paused, and looked at the paper on the wall. "I hope the Lord will send you children; it will help you hold the boy—and perhaps you'll be more efficient! You'll have to be, or they'll die. Get a cook." Then, talking all the way downstairs, she trundled off, in angry, honest, forgiving anxiety for her niece's welfare.

Eleanor, planning for the little sunny room, felt bruised by that bludgeon word—which, as it happened, was not accurate, for Maurice, by this time, had gained a maturity of thought and patience that put him practically out of boyhood. When Eleanor repeated her caller's remarks to him, she left that one word out; "Auntie implied," she said, "that you wouldn't love me, if you didn't have fancy cooking."

"She's a peach on cooking herself," declared Maurice; "but, as far as my taste goes, I don't give a hoot for nightingales' tongues on toast."

So, as fancy cooking was not a necessity to Maurice, and as he had resigned himself to an absence of any social life, and didn't really mind smoking in a room with a silly paper on the walls (he had been very much touched when Eleanor told him what the paper meant to her in hope, and unsatisfied longing), he was perfectly contented in the ugly little house in the raw, new street. In point of fact, music and books provided the Bread of Life to Maurice—with solitaire thrown in as a pleasant extra!—so "wittles and drink" did not begin to be a consideration until the first year of married life had passed. Eleanor remembered the date when—because of something Maurice said—she began to realize that they must be considered. It was on the anniversary of their wedding—a cloudy, cold day; but all the same, with valiant sentimentality, they went—Bingo at their heels—to celebrate, in the meadow of those fifty-four minutes of married life. As they crossed the field, where the tides of blossoming grass ebbed and flowed in chilly gusts of wind, they reminded each other of the first time they had come there, and of every detail of the elopement. When they sat down under the locust tree, Eleanor opened her pocketbook and showed him the little grass ring, lying flat and brittle in a small envelope; and he laughed, and said when he got rich he would buy her a circle of emeralds!

"It's confoundedly cold," he said; "b-r-r! ... Oh, I must tell you the news: I got one in on 'em at the office this morning: Old West has been stung on a big block on Taylor Street. Nothing doing. No tenants. I've been working on a fellow for a month, and, by George! I've landed him! I told him the elevator service was rotten—and one or two other pretty little things they've been sliding over, gracefully, at the office; but I landed him! Say, Nelly, Morton asked me to go to a stag party to-morrow night; do you mind if I go?"

She smiled vaguely at his truthtelling; then sighed, and said, "Why, no; if you want to. Maurice, do you remember you said we'd come back here for our golden wedding?"

"So I did! I'd forgotten. Gosh! maybe we'll be grandparents by that time!" The idea seemed to him infinitely humorous, but she winced. "What a memory you have!" he said. "You ought to be in Weston's! They'd never catch you forgetting where some idiot left the key of the coal bin."

"I sang 'Kiss thy perfumed garments'; remember?"

"'Course I do. Hit 'em again."

She laughed, but ruefully; he had not spoken just that way a year ago. She noticed, suddenly, how much older he looked than on that worshiping day—still the blue, gay eyes, the wind-ruffled blond hair, the hilarious laugh that displayed the very white teeth; but all the same he looked older by more than one year: his mouth had a firmer line; his whole clean-cut face showed responsibility and eager manhood.

Eleanor, clasping her hands around her knees, and watching the grass ebbing and flowing in the wind, sang, "O Spring!" and Maurice, listening, his eyes following the brown ripple of the river lisping in the shallows around the sandbar, and flowing—flowing—like Life, and Time, and Love, sighed with satisfaction at the pure beauty of her voice. "The notes are like wings," he said; "give us a sandwich. I'm about starved."

They spread out their luncheon, and Maurice expressed his opinion of it: "This cake is the limit!" He threw a piece of it at the little dog. "There, Bingo!... Eleanor, he's losing his waist line. But this cake won't fatten him! It's sawdust."

"Hannah is a poor cook," she agreed, nervously; "but if I didn't keep her I don't know what she would do, she's so awfully deaf! She couldn't get another place."

"Why don't you teach her to do things? I suppose she thinks we can live on love," he said, chuckling.

She bit her lip,—and thought of Mrs. Newbolt. "Because I don't know how myself," she said.

"Why don't you learn?" he suggested, feeding the rest of his cake to Bingo; "Edith used to make bully cake—"

She said, with a worried look, that she would try—

Instantly he was patient and very gentle, and said that the cake didn't matter at all! "But I move we try boarding."

They were silent, watching the slipping gleam on the ripples, until Eleanor said, "Oh, Maurice,—if we only had a child!"

"Maybe we will some day," he said, cheerfully. Then, to tease Bingo, he put his arms around his wife and hugged her,—which made the little dog burst into a volley of barks! Maurice laughed, but remembered that he was hungry and said again, "Let's board."

Eleanor, soothing Bingo, wild-eyed and trembling with jealous love, said no! she would try to have things better. "Perhaps I'll get as clever as Edith," she said—and her lip hardened.

He said he wished she would: "Edith used to make a chocolate cake I'd sell my soul for, pretty nearly! Why didn't Hannah give us hard-boiled eggs?" he pondered, burrowing in the luncheon basket for something more to eat; "they don't take brains!"

Of course he was wrong; any cooking takes brains—and nobody seemed able, in his little household, to supply them. However, boarding was such a terrible threat, that Eleanor, dismayed at the idea of leaving that little room, waiting at the top of the house, with its ducks and shepherdesses; and thinking, too, of a whole tableful of people who would talk to Maurice! made heroic efforts to help Hannah, her mind fumbling over recipes and ingredients, as her hands fumbled over dishes and oven doors and dampers. She only succeeded in burning her wrist badly, and making the deaf Hannah say she didn't want a lady messing up her kitchen.

By degrees, however, "living on love" became more and more uncomfortable, and in October the fiasco of a little dinner for Henry Houghton made Maurice say definitely that, when their lease expired, they would board. Mr. Houghton had come to Mercer on business, bringing Edith with him, as a sort of spree for the child; and when he got home he summed up his experience to his Mary:

"That daughter of yours will be the death of me! There was one moment at dinner when only the grace of God kept me from wringing her neck. In the first place, she commented upon the food—which was awful!—with her usual appalling candor. But when she began on the 'harp'—"

"Harp?" Mary Houghton looked puzzled.

"I won't go to their house again! I detest married people who squabble in public. Let 'em scratch each other's eyes out in private if they want to, the way we do! But I'll be hanged if I look on. She calls him 'darling' whenever she speaks to him. She adores him,—poor fellow! I tell you, Mary, a mind that hasn't a single thought except love must be damned stupid to live with. I wished I was asleep a dozen times."

Maurice, too, at his own dinner table, had "wished he was asleep."

In the expectation of seeing Mr. Houghton, Eleanor had planned an early and extra good dinner, after which they meant to take their guests out on the river and float down into the country to a spot—green, still, in the soft October days—from which they could look back at the city, with its myriad lights pricking out in the dusk, and see the copper lantern of the full moon lifting above the black line of the hills. Eleanor, taught by Maurice, had learned to feel the strange loveliness of Mercer's ugliness, and it was her idea that Mr. Houghton should feel it, too. "Edith's too much of a child to appreciate it," she said.

"She's not much of a child; she's almost fourteen!"

"I think," said Eleanor, "that if she's fourteen, she's too old to be as free and easy with men—as she is with you."

"Me? I'm just like a brother! She has no more sense of beauty than a puppy, but she'll like the boat, provided she can row, and adore you."

"Nonsense!" Eleanor said. "Oh, I hope the dinner will be good."

It was far from good; the deaf Hannah had scorched the soup, to which Edith called attention, making no effort to emulate the manners of her father, who heroically took the last drop in his plate. Maurice, anxious that Eleanor's housekeeping should shine, thought the best way to affirm it was to say that this soup was vile, "but generally our soup is fine!"

"Maurice thinks Edith is a wonderful cook," Eleanor said; her voice trembled.

Something went wrong at dessert, and Edith said, generously, that she "didn't mind a bit!" It was at that point that the race of God kept her father from murdering her, for, in a real desire to be polite and cover up the defective dessert, she became very talkative, and said, wasn't it funny? When she was little, she thought a harpy played on a harp; "and I thought you had a harp, because father—"

"I'd like some more ice cream!" Mr. Houghton interrupted, passionately.

"But there's salt in it!" said Edith, surprised. To which her father replied, breathlessly, that he believed he'd not go out on the river; he had a headache. ("Mary has got to do something about this child!")

"I'll go," Edith announced, cheerfully.

"I think I'll stay at home," Eleanor said; "my head is rather inclined to ache, too, Mr. Houghton; so we'll none of us go."

"Me and Maurice will," Edith protested, dismayed.

Maurice gave an anxious look at Eleanor: "It might do your head good, Nelly?"

"Oh, let's go by ourselves," Edith burst out; "I mean," she corrected herself, "people like father and Eleanor never enjoy the things we do. They like to talk."

"I'd like to choke you!" the exasperated father thought. But he cast a really frightened eye at Eleanor, who grew a little paler. There was some laborious talk in the small parlor, where Eleanor's piano took up most of the space: comments on the weather, and explanations of Bingo's snarling. "He's jealous," Eleanor said, with amused pride, and stroking the little faithful head that pressed so closely against her.

At which Edith began, eagerly, "Father says—" ("What the deuce will she say now?" poor Mr. Houghton thought)—"Father says Rover has a human being's horridest vice—jealousy."

"I don't think jealousy is a vice," Eleanor said, coldly.

Mr. Houghton, giving his offspring a terrible glance, said that he must go back to the hotel and take something for his headache; "And don't keep that imp out too late, Maurice. You want to get home and take care of Eleanor."

"Oh no; he doesn't," Eleanor said, and shook hands with her embarrassed guest, who was saying, under his breath, "What taste!"

Out in the street Maurice hurried so that Edith, tucking, unasked, her hand through his arm, had to skip once or twice to keep up with him.... "Maurice," she said, breathlessly, "will you let me row?"

"O Lord—yes! I don't care."

After that Edith did all the talking, until they reached the wharf where Maurice kept his boat; when Edith had secured the oars and they pushed off, he took the tiller ropes, and sat with moody eyes fixed on the water. The mortification of the dinner was gnawing him; he was thinking of the things he might have said to bring Eleanor to her senses! Yet he realized that to have said anything would have added to Mr. Houghton's embarrassment. "I'll have it out with her when I get home," he thought, hotly. "Edith started the mess; why did she say that about Mr. Houghton and Eleanor?" He glanced at her, and Edith, rowing hard, saw the sudden angry look, and was so surprised that she caught a crab, almost keeled over, laughed loudly, and said, "Goodness!" which was at that time, her most violent expletive.

"Maurice," she demanded, "did you see that lady on the float, getting into the boat with those two gentlemen?"

Maurice said, absently: "There were two or three people round. I don't know which you mean."

"The young one. She had red cheeks. I never saw such red cheeks!"

"Oh," said Maurice; "that one? Yes. I saw her. Paint."

"On her cheeks?" Edith said, with round, astonished eyes. "Do ladies put paint on their cheeks?"

Miserable as Maurice was, he did chuckle. "No, Edith; ladies don't," he said, significantly. (Such was the innocent respectability of 1903!)

Edith looked puzzled: "You mean she isn't a lady, Maurice?"

"Look out!" he said, jamming the tiller over; "you were on your right oar."

"But, Maurice," she insisted, "why do you say she isn't a lady?... Oh, Maurice! There she is now! See? In that boat?"

"Well, for Heaven's sake don't announce it to the world!" Maurice remonstrated. "Guess I'll take the oars, Edith. I want some exercise."

Edith sighed, but said, "All right." She wanted to row; but she wanted even more to get Maurice good-natured again. "He's huffy," she told herself; "he's mad at Eleanor, and so am I; but it's no sense to take my head off!" She hated to change seats—they drew in to shore to do it, a concession to safety on Maurice's part—for she didn't like to turn her back on the red-cheeked lady with the two gentlemen in the following skiff; however, she did it; after all, it was Maurice's boat, and she was his company; so, if he "wanted to row her" (thus her little friendly thoughts ran), "why, all right!" Still, she hated not to look at the lady that Maurice said was not a lady. "She must be twice as old as I am; I should think you were a lady when you were twenty-six," she reflected.

But because her back was turned to the "lady," she did not, for an instant, understand the loud splash behind them, and Maurice's exclamation, "Capsized!" The jerk of their boat, as he backed water, made it rock violently. "Idiots!" said Maurice. "I'll pick you up!" he yelled, and rowed hard toward the three people, now slapping about in not very deep water. "Tried to change seats,"—he explained to Edith. "I'm coming!" he called again.

Edith, wildly excited and swaying back and forth, like a coxswain in a boat race, screamed: "We're coming! You'll get drowned—you'll get drowned!" she assured the gasping, bubbling people, who were, somehow or other, making their muddy way toward the shore.

"Get our skiff, will you?" one of the "gentlemen" called to Maurice, who, seeing that there was no danger to any of the immersed merrymakers, turned and rowed out to the slowly drifting boat.

"Grab the painter!" he told Edith as he gained upon it; she obeyed his orders with prompt dexterity. "You can always depend on old Skeezics," Maurice told himself, with a friendly look at her. He had forgotten Eleanor's behavior, and was trying to suppress his grins at the forlorn and dripping people, who were on land now, shivering, and talking with astonishing loudness.

"Oh, the lady's cheeks are coming off!" Edith gasped, as they beached.

Maurice, shoving the trailing skiff on to its owners, said: "Can I do anything to help you?"

"I'll catch my death," said the lady, who was crying; her trickling tears and her sopping handkerchief removed what remnants of her "cheeks" the sudden bath in the river had left. As the paint disappeared, one saw how very pretty the poor draggled butterfly was—big, honey-dark eyes, and quite exquisite features. "Oh, my soul and body!—I'll die!" she said, sobbing with cold and shock.

"Here," said Maurice, stripping off his coat; "put this on."

The girl made some faint demur, and the men, who were bailing out their half-filled skiff, said, "Oh—she can have our coats."

"They're soaked, aren't they?" Maurice said; "and I don't need mine in the least."

Edith gasped; such reckless gallantry gave her an absolutely new sensation. Her heart seemed to lurch, and then jump; she breathed hard, and said, under her breath, "Oh, my!" She felt that she could never speak to Maurice again; he was truly a grown-up gentleman! Her eyes devoured him.

"Do take it," she heard him say to the crying lady, who no longer interested her; "I assure you I don't need it," he said, carelessly; and the "lady" reached out a small, shaking hand, on which the kid glove was soaking wet, and said, her teeth chattering, that she was awfully obliged.

"Get in—get in!" one of the "gentlemen" said, crossly, and as she stepped into the now bailed-out skiff, she said to Maurice, "Where shall I return it to?"

"I'll come and get it," Maurice said—and she called across the strip of water widening between the two boats:

"I'm Miss Lily Dale—" and added her street and number.

Maurice, in his shirt sleeves, lifted his hat; then looked at Edith and grinned. "Did you ever see such idiots? Those men are chumps. Did you hear the fat one jaw at the girl?"

"Did he?" Edith said, timidly. She could hardly bear to look at Maurice, he was so wonderful.

But he, entirely good-natured again, was overflowing with fun. "Let's turn around," he said, "and follow 'em! That fatty was rather happy—did you get on to that flask?"

Edith had no idea what he meant, but she said, breathlessly, "Yes, Maurice." In her own mind she was seeing again that princely gesture, that marvelous tossing of his own coat to the "lady"! "He is exactly like Sir Walter Raleigh," she said to herself. She remembered how at Green Hill she had wanted him to spread his coat before Eleanor's feet;—but that was commonplace! Eleanor was just a married person, "like mother." This was a wonderful drowning lady! Oh, he was Sir Walter! Her eyes were wide with an entirely new emotion—an emotion which made her draw back sharply when once, as he rowed, his hand touched hers. She was afraid of that careless touch. Yet oh, if he would only give her some of his clothes! Oh, why hadn't she fallen into the water! Her heart beat so that she felt she could not speak. It was not necessary; Maurice, singing a song appropriate to the lady with the red cheeks, was not aware of her silence.

"I bet," he said, "that cad takes it out of the little thing! She looked scared, didn't you think, Edith?"

"Yes, ... sir" the little girl said, breathlessly.

Maurice did not notice the new word; "Sorry not to take you down to the Point," he said; "but I ought to keep tabs on that boat. If they capsize again, somebody really might get hurt. She's a—a little fool, of course; but I'd hate to have the fat brute drown her, and he looks capable of it."

However, trailing along in the deepening dusk behind the fat brute, who was rowing hard against the current, they saw the dripping survivors of the shipwreck reach the wharf safely five minutes ahead of them, and scurry off into the darkness of the street.

Maurice, in high spirits, had quite forgiven Eleanor. "I meant to treat you to ice cream, Skeezics," he said, "but I can't go into the hotel. Shirt sleeves wouldn't be admitted in the elegant circles of the Mercer House!"

Instantly a very youthful disappointment readjusted things for Edith; she forgot that strange consciousness which had made her shrink from his careless touch; she had no impulse to say "sir"; she was back again at the point at which the red-cheeked lady had broken in upon their lives. She said, frowning: "My! I did want some ice cream. I wish you hadn't given the lady your coat!"

When Maurice got home, he found a repentant Eleanor bathing very red and swollen eyes.

"How's your head?" he said, as he came, in his shirt sleeves, into her room; she, turning to kiss him and say it was better, stopped short.

"Maurice! Where's your coat?"

His explanation deepened her repentance; "Oh, Maurice,—if you've caught cold!"

He laughed and hugged her (at which Bingo, in his basket, barked violently); and said, "The only thing that bothered me was that I couldn't treat Edith to ice cream."

Eleanor's face, passionately tender, changed sharply: "Edith is an extremely impertinent child! Did you hear her, at dinner, talk about jealousy?"

He looked blank, and said, "What was 'impertinent' in that? Say, Star, the girl in the boat was—tough; she was painted up to the nines, and of course it all came out in the wash. And Buster said her 'cheeks came off'! But she was pretty," Maurice ruminated, beginning to pull off his boots.

"I don't see how you can call a painted woman 'pretty,'" Eleanor said, coldly.

Maurice yawned. "She seemed to belong to the fat brute. He was so nasty to her, I wanted to punch his head."

"Poor girl!" Eleanor said, and her voice softened. "Perhaps I could do something for her? She ought to make him marry her."

Maurice chuckled. "Oh, Nelly, you are innocent! No, my dear; she'll paint some more, and then, probably, get to drinking; and meet one or two more brutes. When she gets quite into the gutter, she'll die. The sooner the better! I mean, the less harm she'll do."

Eleanor's recoil of pain seemed to him as exquisite as a butterfly's shrinking from some harsh finger. He looked at her tenderly. "Star, you don't know the world! And I don't want you to."

"I'd like to help her," Eleanor said, simply.

"You?" he said; "I wouldn't have you under the same roof with one of those creatures!"

His sense of her purity pleased her; the harem idea is, at bottom, pleasing to women; they may resent it with their intellect, but they all of them like to feel they are too precious for the wind of evil realities to blow upon. So, honestly enough, and with the childlike joy of the woman in love, she played up to the harem instinct, shrinking a little and asking timid questions, and making innocent eyes; and was kissed, and assured she was a lovely goose; for Maurice played up to his part, too, with equal honesty (and youth)—the part of the worldly-wise protector. It was the fundamental instinct of the human male; he resents with his intellect the idea that his woman is a fool; but the more foolish she is (on certain lines) the more important he feels himself to be! So they were both very contented, until Maurice happened to say again that he was sorry to have disappointed Edith about the ice cream.

"She's a greedy little thing," Eleanor said from her pillows; her voice was irritated.

"What nonsense!" Maurice said; "as for ice cream, all youngsters like it. I know I do!"

"I saw her hang on to your arm as you went down the street," Eleanor said. "Mrs. Houghton ought to tell her that nice girls don't paw men!"

"Eleanor! She's nothing but a child, and I'm her brother—"

"You are not her brother."

"Oh, Eleanor, don't be so—" he paused; oh, that dreadful word which must not be spoken!—"so unreasonable," he ended, wearily. He lay down beside her in the darkness, and by and by he heard her crying, very softly. "Oh, lord!" he said; and turned over and went to sleep.

Thus do the clouds return after rain. Yet each day the sun rises again....

At breakfast Eleanor, with a pitying word for the "poor thing," reminded her husband that he must go and get his coat.

He said, "Gosh! I'd forgotten it!" and added that he liked his eggs softer. He would have "played up" again, and smiled at her innocence, if he had thought of it, but he was really concerned about his eggs, "Hannah seems to think I like brickbats," he said, good-naturedly.

Eleanor winced; "Poor Hannah is so stupid! But she's getting deafer every day, so I can't send her away!" Added to her distress at the scorched soup of the night before, was this new humiliation of "brickbats;" naturally she forgot the "poor thing."

Maurice almost forgot her himself; but as he left the office in the afternoon he did remember the coat. At the address which the red-cheeked lady had given him, he found her card—"Miss Lily Dale"—below a letter box in the tiled, untidy vestibule of a yellow-brick apartment house, where he waited, grinning at the porcelain ornateness about him, for a little jerking elevator to take him up to the fourth floor. There, in a small, gay, clean parlor of starched lace curtains, and lithographs, and rows of hyacinth bulbs just started in blue and purple glasses on the window sill, he found the red-cheeked young lady, rather white-cheeked. Indeed, there were traces of hastily wiped-away tears on her pretty face.

"My friend, Mr. Batty, said I upset the boat," she said, taking the coat out of the wardrobe and brushing it briskly with a capable little hand.

The coat reeked with perfumery, and Maurice said, "Phew!" to himself; but threw it over his arm, and said that Mr. Batty had only himself to blame. "A man ought to know enough not to let a lady move about in a rowboat!"

"Won't you be seated?" Lily said; she lighted a cigarette, and shoved the box over to him, across the varnished glitter of the table top.

Maurice, introducing himself—"My name's Curtis";—and, taking in all the details of the comfortable, vulgar little room, sat down, took a cigarette, and said it was a warm day for October; she said she hated heat, and he said he liked winter best.... Then he saw a bruise on her wrist and said: "Why, you gave yourself a dreadful knock, didn't you? Was it on the rowlock?"

Her face dropped into sullen lines: "It wasn't the boat did it."

Maurice, with instant discretion, dropped the subject. But he was sorry for her; she made him think of a beaten kitten. "You must take care of that wrist," he said, his blue eyes full of sympathy. When he went away he told himself he had spotted the big man as a brute the minute he saw him. The "kitten" seemed to him so pathetic that he forgot Eleanor's exquisiteness, and told her about the bruised wrist and the reeking coat, and how pretty the girl was.

"I don't know anything vulgarer than perfumery!" his wife said, with a delicate shrug.

Maurice agreed, adding, with a grin, that he had noticed that when ladies were short on the odor of sanctity, they were long on the odor of musk.

"I always keep dried rose leaves in my bureau drawers," Eleanor said; and he had the presence of mind to say, "You are a rose yourself!"

A husband's "presence of mind" in addressing his wife is, of course, a confession; it means they are not one—for nobody makes pretty speeches to oneself! However, Maurice's "rose" made no such deduction.



CHAPTER IX

It was after Mr. Houghton had swallowed the scorched soup and meditated infanticide, that boarding became inevitable. Several times that winter Maurice said that Hannah "was the limit; so let's board?"

And toward spring, in spite of the cavorting lambs and waddling ducks in the little waiting, empty room upstairs, Eleanor yielded. "We can go to housekeeping again," she thought, "if—"

So the third year of their marriage opened in a boarding house. They moved (Bingo again banished to Mrs. O'Brien), on their wedding anniversary, and instead of celebrating by going out to "their river," they spent a hot, grimy day settling down in their third-floor front.

"If people come to see us," said Maurice, ruefully, standing with his hands in his pockets surveying their new quarters, "they'll have to sit on the piano!"

"Nobody'll come," Eleanor said.

Maurice's eyes narrowed: "I believe you need 'em, Nelly? I knock up against people at the office, and I know several fellows and girls outside—"

"What girls?"

"Oh, the fellows' sisters; but you—"

"I don't want anybody but you!"

Maurice was silent. Two years ago, when Eleanor had said almost the same thing: she was willing to live on a desert island, with him!—it had been oil on the flames of his love; now, it puzzled him. He didn't want to live on a desert island, with anybody! He needed more than one man "Friday," and any women "Thursdays" who might come along were joyously welcomed. "I am a social beggar, myself," he said; and began to whistle and fuss about, trying to bring order out of a chaos of books and photographs and sheet music. She sat watching him—the alert, vigorous figure; the keen face under the shock of blond hair; the blue eyes that crinkled so easily into laughter. Her face was thinner, and there were rings of fatigue under her dark eyes, and that little nursery in the house they had left, made a swelling sense of emptiness in her heart. ("If I see any awfully pretty nursery paper this winter, I'll buy it, and have it ready,—in case we should have to get another house," she thought.) "Oh, do stop whistling," she said; "it goes through me!"

"Poor Nelly!" he said, kindly, and stopped.

The astonishing thing about the "boarding-house marriage," is that it ever survives the strain of the woman's idleness and the man's discomfort! But it does, occasionally. Even this marriage survived Miss Ladd's boarding house, for a time. At first it went smoothly enough because Maurice couldn't blame Eleanor's cook, and Eleanor couldn't say that "nothing she did pleased Maurice"; so two reasons for irritability were eliminated; but a new reason appeared: Maurice's eager interest in everything and everybody—especially everybody!—and his endless good nature, overflowed around the boarding-house table. Everyone liked him, which Eleanor entirely understood; but he liked everyone,—which she didn't understand.

The note of this mutual liking was struck the very first night when Maurice went down into the dingy basement dining room; he and Eleanor made rather a sensation as they entered: Eleanor, handsome and silent, produced the impression of cold reserve; Maurice, amiable and talkative, gave a little shock of interest and pleasure to the fifteen or twenty people eating indifferent food about a table covered with a not very fresh cloth. Before the meal was over he had made himself agreeable to an elderly woman on his left, ventured some drollery to a pretty high-school teacher of mathematics opposite him, and given a man at the end of the table the score. When Eleanor rose, Maurice had to rise, too, though his dessert was not quite devoured; and as the couple left the room there was a murmur of pleasure: