"A real addition to our family," said Miss Ladd.

The bond salesman said, "I wonder if he'll go to the ball game with me on Saturday? I'll get the tickets."

The school-teacher said, "He's awfully good looking."

The widow's comment was only, "Nice boy."

Upstairs in their own room, Maurice said: "What pleasant people! Nelly, let's get some fun out of this; don't dash up here the minute you swallow your food!"

She wondered, silently, how he could call them "pleasant"! To her they were all rather common, pushing persons, who wanted to talk to Maurice. But as her one desire was to do what he liked, she really did try to help him "get some fun out of them." Every night at dinner she smiled laboriously when he teased the teacher, and she listened to the elderly woman in mourning, whose clever talk was so absorbing to Maurice that sometimes he didn't hear his wife speaking to him! Yes; Eleanor tried. Yet, in less than a month Maurice found himself beside a boarder of his own sex, instead of Mrs. Davis, and saw that the school-teacher was too far down the table for jokes. When he asked why their seats had been changed, Eleanor said she had felt a draught—which caused the widow to smile, and write on a piece of paper an arithmetical statement: "Selfishness + vanity - humor = jealousy." She handed it to the teacher, who laughed and shrugged her shoulders:

"But she's awfully in love with him," she conceded, under her breath.

The older woman shook her head: "No, my dear; she isn't. No jealous woman knows the meaning of love."

But Eleanor did not see Miss Moore's contemptuous smile, or Mrs. Davis's grave glance. One of the pitiful things about jealous people is that they don't know how amusing—or else boring—or else irritating—they are to an observant and entirely unsympathetic world! Eleanor had no idea that the whole tableful of people knew she was jealous, and found her ridiculous. She only knew that Maurice seemed to like them—which meant that her society "wasn't enough for him "! So she tried to make it enough for him. At dinner she talked to him so animatedly (and so personally) that no one else could get a word in edgewise. Dinner over, she was uneasy until she had dragged her eager-eyed young husband up to the desert island of their third-floor front—a dingy room, with a black-marble mantelpiece, and a worn and frowzy carpet. There were some steel engravings, dim under their old glasses, on the wall,—Evangeline, and Lincoln's Cabinet, and Daniel Webster in a rumpled shirt and a long swallowtail;—all of which Eleanor's looking-glass and the mirrored doors of a black-walnut wardrobe, reflected in multiplying dullness.

Maurice's charming good nature in that first boarding winter never failed. Eleanor's silences—which he had long since discovered were merely empty, not mysterious—were at least no tax on his patience; so he never once called her "silly." He did, occasionally, feel a faint uneasiness lest people might think she was older than he—which was, of course, the beginning of self-consciousness as to what he had done in marrying her. But he loved her. He still loved her. "She isn't very well," he used to defend her to Mrs. Newbolt; "she nearly killed herself, saving my life. She's not been the same girl since."

"'Girl'?" said Mrs. Newbolt; "she's exactly the same woman, only more so because she's older. I hope she won't lose her figger; she's gettin' thin. My dear grandmother—she was a Dennison; fat; I can hear her now talkin' to her daughters: 'Girls! Don't lose your figgers!' She had red hair."

Eleanor had not lost her figure; it was still graciously erect, and with lovely curves of bosom and shoulders; but, somehow, she seemed older—older even than she was! Perhaps because of her efforts to be girlish? It was as if she wore clothes she had outgrown—clothes that were too tight and too short. She used Maurice's slang without its virile appropriateness; when they accepted an invitation from one of Maurice's new acquaintances, her anxiety to be of his generation was pathetic—or ludicrous, as one happened to look at it. These friends of Maurice's seemed to have innumerable interests in common with him that she knew nothing about—and jokes! How tired she got of their jokes, which were mostly preposterous badinage, expressed with entire solemnity and ending in yells of laughter. Yet she tried to laugh, too; though she rarely knew what it was all about. There is nothing which divides the generations more sharply than their ideas of humor. But Eleanor tried, very pitifully hard, to be silly with the kind of silliness which Maurice seemed to enjoy; but, alas! she only achieved the silliness which he—like every husband on earth!—hated: the silliness of small jealousies. Once she told Maurice she didn't like those dinner parties that his friends were always asking them to,—"I think it's nicer here," she said.

And he said, cheerfully: "Don't go! I don't mind going alone."

"I know you don't," she said, wistfully.... "Why can't he be satisfied to stay at home with me?" she said once to her aunt; and Mrs. Newbolt told her why:

"Because you don't interest him. Eleanor! if you want to keep that boy, urge him to go out and have a good time, without you!" Then she added some poignantly true remarks: "My dear father used to say, 'Just as many men are faithless to their wives because their wives have plain minds, as because other women have pretty faces.' Well, I'm afraid poor dear mother's mind was plain; that's why I always made an effort to talk to your uncle, and be entertainin'. And I'll tell you another thing—for if I have a virtue it's candor—if you let him see you're jealous, he'll make it worth your while! You've got a rip in the back seam of your waist. No man ever keeps on lovin' a jealous woman; he just pretends to, to keep the peace."

Of course this was as unintelligible to Eleanor as it is to all women of her type of mind. So, instead of considering Maurice's enjoyment of society, she committed the absurdity of urging him to enjoy what she enjoyed—a solitude of two. To herself she explained his desire to see other people, by saying it was because they had no children. "When we have a child, he won't want to be with those boys and girls! Oh, why don't we have a baby?" Her longing for children was like physical hunger. But only Mrs. O'Brien understood it. When Eleanor went, in her faithful way, two or three times a week, to sing to little sickly Don (and pet the boarding and rather pining Bingo), Mrs. O'Brien, listening to the little songs, pretty and silly, would draw a puckery hand over her eyes: "She'd ought to have a dozen of her own! If that boy don't treat her good, I'll iron off every button he's got!"

When Eleanor (hoping for a baby) worried lest Maurice's hopes, too, were disappointed, her gentleness to him was passionate and beseeching; but sometimes, watching his attention to other people, the gentleness grew rigid in an accusation that, because they hadn't a child, he was "getting tired of her"! Whenever she said this foolish thing, there would come, afterward, a rain of repentant tears. But repentance cannot always change the result of foolish words—and the result is so often out of proportion to the words! As Maurice had said that day in their meadow, of Professor Bradley and the banana skin—a very little thing "can throw the switches," in human life!

It was the "little thing" of a lead pencil, in keeping the accounts of their endless games of solitaire, that threw the switches now, for Maurice Curtis.... He happened to produce a very soft pencil, which he had borrowed, he said, "from a darned pretty woman he was showing a house to," and had forgotten to return to her.

Eleanor said it seemed to her bad taste to talk of a strange woman that way: "If she's a lady she wouldn't want a man she didn't know to speak so—so lightly of her."

"I have yet to meet one of your sex who objects to being called pretty," Maurice said, dryly.

To which Eleanor replied that she preferred a hard lead pencil, anyhow,—but her wishes seemed to be of no importance! "You're tired of me, Maurice." He said, "Oh, damn!" She said, "I won't have you swear at me!"

He pushed back his chair, toppled the flimsy table over, scattering all the cards on the floor. The falling table struck her knee; she screamed; he flung out of the room—out of the house, into the hot darkness of an August night.... The switches were thrown....

Down on Tyler Street there had been another quarrel—as trivial as the difference of opinion as to hard and soft lead pencils, and again human lives were shifted from one track to another. It was Lily who ran out into the darkness, and wandered through the streets; then strayed down to the bridge that spanned the hurrying black water of that same river which, two years before, had lisped and laughed under Maurice and Eleanor's happy eyes. Lily, watching the current, thought angrily of Batty—then a passing elbow jostled her and some one said, "Beg pardon!" She turned and saw Maurice.

"Well, I do say!" she said; and Maurice, pausing at the voice in the dark, began a brief, "Excuse me; I stumbled—" saw who it was, and said, "Why, Miss Lily! How are you? I haven't seen you for an age!"

She answered with some small jocosity; then suddenly struck her little fist on the railing. "Well, I'm just miserable; that's how I am, if you want to know! Batty—"

Maurice frowned. "Has that pup hurt you?"

She nodded: "I don't know why I put up with him!"

"Shake him!" he advised, good-naturedly.

"I 'ain't got any other friend." She spoke with half-laughing anger; indeed, she was so pretty and so plucky that he forgot, for a moment, the irritation at Eleanor which had driven him out into the night, and it came into his mind that something ought to be done for girls like this. He remembered that Eleanor herself had said so, "Perhaps I could do something for her?" Eleanor had said.

"She isn't bad," he thought, looking at Lily; "she's just a fool, like all of 'em. But there ought to be some way of fishing 'em out of the gutter, before they get to the very bottom. Maybe Eleanor could give her a hand up?" Then he asked her about herself: Had she friends? Where did her family live? Could she do any work? He was rather diverted by his own philanthropy, but it seemed to him that it would be the decent thing to advise the girl, seriously. "I'll talk to her," he thought. "Come on!" he said; "let's hunt up some place and have something to eat."

"I ain't hungry," she said—then saw the careless straightforwardness of his face, and was straightforward herself: "I guess I'd better be going home."

"Oh, come on," he urged her.

She yielded, with a little rollicking chuckle; and as they walked toward a part of town more suitable for such excursions, she confided to him she was twenty, and she'd been "around" for a year.

("Twenty-five, if she's a day," he thought.)

They strolled along for several blocks before discovering, in the purlieus of Tyler Street, a dingy "ice-cream parlor," eminently fitted for interviews with the Lilys of the locality. At a marble-topped table, translucent with years of ice-cream rendezvous, they waited for his order to be filled, and she saw the amused honesty of his face and he saw the good nature of hers; which made him think again of Eleanor's wish to help her.

He urged some indifferent cake upon her, and joked about how many saucers of ice cream they could consume between them; then he became serious: Why didn't she drop Batty?

"Oh," she said, "if I only could drop him! I hate him. He's the first friend I've had."

"Was he really the—the first?" Maurice said. His question was the old human interest of playing with fire, but he supposed that it was a desire to raise the fallen.

"Well, except ... there was a man; I expected to marry him. Then Batty, he come along."

"I see," said Maurice. "Where's the first man?"

"I don't know. I was only sixteen."

"Damn him!" Maurice said, sympathetically. He was so moved that he ordered more ice cream; then it occurred to him that he ought to let her know that he was entirely a philanthropist. "My wife and I'll help you," he said.

"Oh ... you're married? You're real young!" she commented.

"I'm no chicken. My wife and I think exactly alike about these things. Of course she's not a prude. She understands life, just as I do. And she'd love to be a real friend to you. She'll put you on your feet, and think none the worse of you. Tell me about yourself," he urged, intimately; he felt some deep satisfaction stir within him, which he supposed was his recognition of a moral purpose. But she drew back into her own reserves.

"They always ask that," she thought; and the momentary reality she had shown hardened into the easy lying of her business: she told this or that—the cruel father of fiction, who tried to drive her into marriage with the rich old man; the wicked lover who destroyed trusting innocence; the inevitable facilis descensus—Batty at last. And now the ice-cream parlor in this dirty street, with the clear-eyed, handsome, amused young man, who had forgotten his own anger in the impulse, so frequent in the very young and very upright man, to "save" some little creature of the gutter! As for Maurice, he said to himself, "She's a sweet little thing; and not really bad."

He was right there: Lily was not bad; she was as far from sin as she was from virtue—just a little, unmoral, very amiable animal.

As for Maurice, he continued to discuss her future of rectitude and honor—his imagination reaching in a bound amazing heights. Why not be a trained nurse?—and have a hospital of her own, and gather about her, as assistants, girls who—"well, had had a tough time of it," he said, delicately. As he talked, fatigue at the boredom of his highly moral sentiments crept into her face. She swallowed an occasional yawn, and murmured to most of his statements, "Is that so?" She was sleepy, and wished he would stop talking....

"Guess I'll be going along," she said, good-naturedly.

"I'll come and see you to-morrow," Maurice said, impassioned with the idea of saving her; "then I'll tell you what my wife will do for you."

They went out together and walked toward Lily's rooms; but somehow they both fell silent. Lily was again afraid of Batty, and Maurice's exhilaration had begun to ebb; there came into his mind the bleak remembrance of the overturned table and Eleanor's sobs....

At the door of the apartment house where Lily lived, she said, nervously, "I'd ask you to come in, but he—"

"Oh, I understand; I've no desire to meet the gentleman! What time will I come to-morrow, when he's not around?"

She reflected, uneasily: "Well, I ain't sure—"

Before she could finish, Batty loomed up beside them. He was plainly drunk. "I lost my key," he said; "and I've been waiting—"

"Good night, Miss Lily," Maurice said,—"If he's nasty to her, I'll go back," he thought. He was only halfway down the block when he heard a little piping scream—"O-o-o-w! O-o-o-w!" He turned, and saw her trying to pull her hand away from Batty's twisting grip: he was at her side in a moment: "Here! Drop it!" he said, sharply—and landed an extremely neat blow on the drunken man's jaw. Batty, rubbing his cheek, and staring at this very unexpected assailant in profound and giggling astonishment, slouched into the house.

"He 'most twisted my hand off!" Lily said; "oh, ain't he the beast?" She cringed and shook her bruised wrist, then gave Maurice an admiring look. "My soul and body! you lit into him good!" she said; "what am I going to do? I'm afraid to go in."

"If I had a house of my own," Maurice said, "I'd take you home, and my wife would look after you. But we are boarding.... Haven't you some friend you could go to for to-night? ... To-morrow my wife will come and see you," he declared.

"Oh, gracious me, no!" In the midst of her anger she couldn't help laughing. ("He's a reg'lar baby!" she thought.) "No; your wife's a busy society lady, I'm sure. Don't bother about me. I'll just wait round till he goes to sleep." She dabbed at her eyes with a little wet ball of a handkerchief.

"Here, take mine," he said. And with this larger and dryer piece of linen, she did manage to make her face more presentable.

"When he's asleep, I'll slip in," she said.

"Well, let's go and sit down somewhere," Maurice suggested. She agreed, and there was some haphazard wandering about in the darkness, then a weary sitting on a bench in the park, marking time till Batty would surely be asleep.

"You sure handed one out to him," Lily said.

Maurice chuckled at the role of knight-errant which she seemed to discern in him, but he talked earnestly of her future, and once or twice, soothed by his voice, she dozed—but he didn't know it. Indeed, he told himself afterward that her silences showed how his words were sinking in! "It only goes to prove," he thought, when at midnight he left her at her own door, "that the flower is in all of them! If you only go about it right, you can bring their purity to the surface! She felt all I said. Eleanor will be awfully interested in her."

He was quite sure about Eleanor; he had entirely forgiven her; he wanted to wake her up, and sit on the edge of her bed, and tell her of his evening, and what a glorious thing it would be to lift one lovely young soul from the gutter.



CHAPTER X

But Eleanor would not "wake up." Within an hour of her foolish outbreak she had begun to listen for his returning step. Then she went to bed and cried and cried, "He doesn't love me," she said, over and over; and once she said, "it is because I am—" But she didn't finish this; she just got up and went over to the bureau and stared into the mirror; she even lit a candle and held it close to the glass; after a while she saw what she was looking for. "Edith tried to make him notice them, that first summer at Green Hill," she thought.

At eleven she went to the window and watched, her eyes straining into the darkness. When, far down the street, a man's figure came in range, she held her breath until it walked into and out of the circling glare of the arc light—not Maurice! It was after twelve when she saw him coming—and instantly she flew back to her bed. When he entered the faintly lighted room, Eleanor was, apparently, sound asleep.

"Star?"

No answer.

He leaned over, saw the droop of her lip and the puffed eyelids—and drew back. Perhaps, if he had kissed her, the soft lead pencil might not have acted as Destiny; she might have melted under the forlorn story he was so eager to tell her. But her tear-stained face did not suggest a kiss.

In the morning Eleanor had what she called a "bilious headache," and when Maurice skirted the subject of the "flower," she was too physically miserable to be interested. When she was well again, the opportunity—if it was an opportunity!—was lost; her interest in Lily was not needed, because a call at the apartment house showed Maurice that Batty was forgiven. So he forgot his desire to lift the fallen, in more of those arid moments with Eleanor; reproaches—and reconciliations! Tears—and fire! But fires gradually die down under tears, no matter how one spends one's breath blowing loving words on the wet embers! Enough tears will put out any fire.

Lily, too, was shedding angry tears in those days, and they probably had their effect in cooling Batty's heart; for his unpleasantness finally culminated in his leaving her, and by October she was living in the yellow-brick apartment house alone, and very economically—yet not so economically that she did not buy hyacinth bulbs for the blue and purple glasses on her sunny window sill.

Once Maurice, remembering with vague amusement his reformatory impulse, went to see her; but he did not talk to Eleanor about the call. By this time there were days when he talked as little as possible to Eleanor about anything,—not because he was secretive—he hated secrecy! "It's next door to lying," he thought, faintly disgusted at himself,—but because she seemed to feel hurt if he was interested in anyone except herself. Maurice had passed the point which had seemed so terrible at Green Hill, where he had called his wife "silly." He never called her silly now. He merely, over and over, called himself a fool.

"I've made an ass of myself," he used to think, sorting out his cards for solitaire and looking furtively at the thin face, with its lines of wistful and faded beauty. At forty-two, a happy, busy woman, with a sound digestion, will not look faded; on the contrary, she is at her best—as far as looks are concerned! Eleanor was not happy; her digestion was uncertain; she did not go into society, and she had no real occupation, except to go every day to Mrs. O'Brien's and take Bingo for a walk. Even her practicing had been pretty much given up, for fear of disturbing the people on the floor below her.

"Why don't you have some plants around?" Maurice suggested; "they'd give you something to do! I saw a lot of hyacinths growing in glasses, once; I'll buy some bulbs for you."

"Oh, I'm one of the people flowers won't grow for," she said.

Mrs. Newbolt made a suggestion, too. "Pity you can't have Bingo to keep you company. That's what comes of boarding. I knew a woman who boarded, and she lost her teeth. Chambermaid threw 'em away. Come in and see me any evening when Maurice is out."

As Maurice was frequently out, the invitation was sometimes accepted, and it was on one of these occasions that Mrs. Newbolt, spreading out her cards on the green baize of her solitaire table with fat, beringed hands, made her suggestion:

"Eleanor, you've aged. I believe you're unhappy?"

"No, I'm not! Why should I be?"

"Well, I wouldn't blame you if you were," Mrs. Newbolt said. "'Course you'd have brought it on yourself; I could have told you what to expect! Your dear uncle Thomas used to say that, after a thing happened, I was the one to tell people that they might have expected it. You see, I made a point of bein' intelligent; of course I wasn't too intelligent. A man doesn't like that. You're gettin' gray, Eleanor. Pity you haven't children. He doesn't look very contented!—but men are men," said Mrs. Newbolt.

"He ought to be contented," Eleanor said, passionately; "I adore him!"

"You've got to interest him," her aunt said; "that's more important than adorin' him! A man can buy a certain kind of adoration, but he can't purchase interest."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Eleanor said, trembling.

"Well, if you don't, I'm sure I can't tell you," Mrs. Newbolt said, despairingly; but she made one more attempt: "My dear father used to say that the finest tribute a man could put on his wife's tombstone would be, 'She was interestin' to live with.' So I tell you, Eleanor, if you want to hold that boy, make him laugh!" She was so much in earnest that for a few minutes she actually stopped talking!

Eleanor could not make Maurice laugh—she never made anybody laugh! But for a while she did "hold him"—because he was a gallant youngster, making the best of his bargain. That he had begun to know it was a bad bargain did not lessen his regret for his wife's childlessness, which he knew made her unhappy, nor his pity for her physical forlornness—which he blamed largely on himself: "She almost died that night on the mountain, to save my life!"

But he had ceased to be touched by her reiterated longing for children; he was even a little bored by it. And he was very much bored by her reproaches, her faint tempers and their following ardors of repentant love—bitternesses, and cloying sweetnesses! Yet, in spite of these things, the boarding-house marriage survived the lengthening of the fifty-four minutes of ecstasy into three years. But it might not have survived its own third winter had it not been that Maurice's unfaithfulness enforced his faithfulness. For by spring that squabble about lead pencils, which had turned his careless steps toward the bridge, had turned his life so far from Eleanor's that he had been untrue to her.

He had not meant to be untrue; nothing had been farther from his mind or purpose. But there came a bitter Sunday afternoon in March ...

Eleanor, saying he did not "understand her," cried about something—afterward Maurice was not sure just what—perhaps it was a question from one of the other boarders about the early 'eighties, and she felt herself insulted; "As if I could remember!" she told Maurice; but whatever it was, he had tried to comfort her by joking about it. Then she had reproached him for his unkindness—to most crying wives a joke is unkind. Then she had said that he was tired of her! At which he took refuge in silence—and she cried out that he acknowledged it!

"You can't deny it! You're tired of me because I'm older than you!"

And he said, between his teeth, "If you were old enough to have any sense, I wouldn't be tired of you."

She gave a cry; then stood, the back of her hand against her lips, her eyes wide with terror.

Maurice threw down a book he had been trying to read, got up, plunged into his overcoat, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and, without a word, walked out of the room. A moment later the front door banged behind him. Eleanor, alone, stood perfectly still; she had said foolish things like that many times; she rather liked to say them! But she had not believed them; now, her own words were a boomerang,—they seemed to strike her in the face! He was tired of her. Instantly she was alert! What must she do? She sat down, tense with thought; first of all, she must be sweet to him; she mustn't be cross; then she must try (Mrs. Newbolt had told her so!) to "entertain" him. "I'll read things, and talk to him the way Mrs. Davis does!" She must sew on his buttons, and scold poor old O'Brien.... With just this same silent determination she had hurried to act that night on the mountain!

But while she was sitting there in their cheerless room, planning and planning!—Maurice was out, wandering about in the gray afternoon. It had begun to snow, in a fitful, irritating way—little gritty pellets that blew into his face. He had nowhere to go—four o'clock is a dead time to drop in on people! He had nothing to do, and nothing to think of—except the foolish, middle-aged woman, stating, in their dreary third-floor front, an undeniable fact—he was tired of her! Walking aimlessly about in the cold, he said to himself, dully, "Why was I such an idiot as to marry her?" He was old enough to curse himself for his folly, but he was young enough to suffer, agonies of mortification, and to pity himself, too; pity himself for the mere physical discomfort of his life: the boarding-house table, with its uninteresting food; the worn shirt cuff which was scratching his wrist; and he pitied himself for his spiritual discomfort—when Eleanor called him "darling" at the dinner table, or exhibited her jealousy before people! "They're sorry for me—confound 'em!" he thought.... Yet how trivial the cuff was, or even—yes, even the impertinence which was "sorry" for him!—how unimportant, when compared to a ring of braided grass, and the smell of locust blossoms, and a lovely voice, rising and falling:

"O Spring!"

"Oh, damn!" he said to himself, feeling the scrape of worn linen on the back of his hand. Then he fell into certain moody imaginings with which that winter he frequently and harmlessly amused himself. He used to call these flights of fancy "fool thoughts"; but they were at least an outlet to his smoldering irritation, "Suppose I should kick over the traces some day?" his thoughts would run; and again, "Suppose I should be in a theater fire, and 'disappear,' and never come back, and she'd think I was dead," "Suppose there should be a war, and I should enlist," ... and so forth, and so forth. "Fool thoughts," of course!—but Maurice is not the only man upon whom a jealous woman has thrust such thoughts, or who has found solace in the impossible! So, now, wandering about in the cold, he amused himself by imagining various ways of "kicking over the traces"; then, suddenly, it occurred to him that he wanted something to eat. "By George!" he thought, "I'll get that girl, Lily, and we'll go and have a good dinner!"

Even in the rococo vestibule of the yellow-brick apartment house, while he pressed the bell below Miss Lily Dale's letter box, he began to feel a glow of comfort; and when Lily let him into her little parlor, all clean and vulgar and warm, and fragrant with blossoming bulbs, and gave him a greeting that was almost childlike in its laughing pleasure, his sense of physical well-being was a sort of hitting back at Eleanor.

"Oh," said little Lily, "my! Ain't you cold! Why, your hand's just like ice!"

He let her help him off with his coat, and push him into what had been the vanished Batty's chair; then she saw that his feet were wet, and insisted (to his horror) on unlacing his boots and making him put on a pair of slippers.

"But I was going to take you out to dinner," he remonstrated.

She said: "Oh no! It's cold. I'll cook something for you, and we'll have our dinner right by that fire."

"Can you cook?" he said, with admiring astonishment.

"You bet I can!" she said; "I'll give you a good supper: you just wait!" In her pretty, laughing face was very honest friendliness. "I 'ain't forgot that time you handed it out to Batty! He had a bruise on his chin for a week!"

"A steak!" he exclaimed, watching her preparations in the tiny closet of a kitchen that opened into her parlor.

She nodded: "Ain't it luck to have it in the house? A friend of mine gave it to me this afternoon; her father's a butcher; and he's got a dandy shop on the next block; an' Annie run in with it, an' she says" (Lily was greasing her broiler), "'there,' she says, 'is a present for you!'"

Maurice insisted upon helping, and was told where to get the dishes and what to put on the table, and that if he opened that closet he'd see the beer. "I got just one bottle," she said, chuckling; "Batty stocked up. When he lit out, that was all he left behind him."

"Seen him lately?" Maurice asked.

Lily's face changed. "I 'ain't seen—anyone, since November," she said; "I'm a saleslady at Marston's. But I'll have to get out of this flat when Batty's lease runs out. He took it by the year. He was going to 'settle down,' and 'have a home,'—you know the talk? So he took it for the year. Well, he said I could stay till June. So I'm staying. There! It's done!" She put the sizzling steak on a platter and pressed butter and pepper and salt into it with an energetic knife and fork. "I bet," she said, "you wouldn't get a better steak than this at the Mercer House!"

"I bet I wouldn't get one as good," he assured her.

As he ate his extremely well-cooked steak, and drank a cup of extremely well-made coffee, and reflected that the pretty, amber-eyed woman who, after the manner of her kind, had already dropped into the friendliness of a nickname, and who waited on him with a sweet deftness, was a reformed character, owing, no doubt, to his own efforts, Maurice, comfortable in mind and body, felt the intense pleasure of punishing Eleanor by his mere presence in Lily's rooms. For, if she could know where he was!... "Gosh!" said Maurice. But of course she never would know. He wouldn't think of telling her where he had spent his evening; which shows how far they had drifted apart since that night when he had come home in his shirt sleeves, and been so eager to tell her how he had given his coat to the "poor thing"!

No; if he told Eleanor of Lily, now, there would be no sympathy for a girl who was really trying to keep straight; no impulse to do any "uplift" work! For that matter, Lily could do something in the way of uplift for Eleanor! ... Look at this tidy, gay little room, and the well-cooked steak, and the bulbs on the window sill! He strolled over and looked at the row of purple hyacinth glasses, full now of threadlike roots and topped with swelling buds. "You're quite a gardener," he said.

"Well, there!" said Lily; "if I hadn't but ten cents, I'd spend five for a flower!"

After they had washed the dishes together she made him comfortable in the big chair, and even put a blossoming hyacinth on the table beside him, so he could smell it now and then. Then she sat down on a hassock at his feet, with her back to the fire, and, flecking off the ashes of her cigarette over her shoulder, she talked a friendly trickle of funny stories; Maurice, smoking, too, thought how comfortable he was, and how pleasant it was to have a girl like Lily to talk to. Once or twice he laughed uproariously at some giggling joke. "She has lots of fun in her," he reflected; "and she's a bully cook; and her hair is mighty pretty.... Say, Lily, don't you want to trim my cuff? It's scratching me to death."

"You bet I do!" Lily said, and got her little shiny scissors and trimmed the broken edge of a worn-out cuff that Eleanor had never noticed.

He felt her small, warm fingers on his hand, and had a sense of comfort that made him almost forget Eleanor. "It would serve her right if I took Lily on," he thought. But he had not the remotest intention of taking Lily on! He only played with the idea, because the impossible reality would serve Eleanor right.

It was a month or two later, on the rebound of another dreariness with Eleanor, that the reality came, and he did "take Lily on." When he did so, no one could have been more astonished—under his dismay and horror—than Maurice.

Unless it was Lily? She had been so certain that he had no ulterior purpose, and so completely satisfied with her own way of living, that her rather snuggling friendliness with him was as honest as a boy's. Her surprise at her own mistake showed how genuine her intention of straightness really was. When he came, once or twice to see her, he called her Lily, and she called him "Curt," and they joked together like two playfellows,—except when he was too gloomy to joke. But it was his gloominess that made her feel sure there was nothing but friendliness in his calls. She was not curious about him; she knew he was married, but she never guessed that his preoccupation—during the spring Maurice was very preoccupied with his own wretchedness and given to those cynical fancies about "theater fires";—was due to the fact that he and his wife didn't get along. She merely supposed that, like most of her "gentlemen friends," "Curt" didn't talk about his wife. But, unlike the gentlemen of her world he was, apparently, a husband whose acquaintance with her had its limits. So they were both astonished....

But when Maurice discovered that such acquaintance had also its risks, the shock was agonizing. He was overwhelmed with disgust and shame. Once, at his desk, brooding over what had happened, his whipping instinct of truthfulness roused a sudden, frantic impulse in him to go home and confess to Eleanor, and ask her to forgive him. She never would, of course! No woman would; Eleanor least of all. But oh, if he only could tell her! As he couldn't, remorse, with no outlet of words, smoldered on his consciousness, as some hidden and infected wound might smolder in his flesh. Yet he knew there would be no further unfaithfulness. He would never, he told himself, see Lily again! That was easy! He was done with all "Lilys." If he could only shed the self-knowledge which he was unable to share with Eleanor, as easily as he could shed Lily, how thankful he would be! If he could but forget Lily by keeping away from her! But of course he could not forget. And with memory, and its redeeming pain of shame, was also the stabbing mortification of knowing that he had made a fool of himself, again! First Eleanor; then—Lily. Sometimes, with this realization of his idiocy, he would feel an almost physical nausea. It was so horrible to him, that when, a month later, the anniversary which marked his first folly came around again, he made an excuse of having to be away on business. It seemed to Maurice that to go out to their field, with this loathsome secrecy (which was, of course, an inarticulate lie) buried in his soul, would be like carrying actual corruption in his hands! So he went out of town on some trumped-up engagement, and Eleanor, left to herself, took little pining Bingo for a walk. In a lonely; place in the park, holding the dog on her knee, she looked into his passionately loving liquid eyes and wiped her own; eyes on his silky ears....

Those were aging months for Maurice; and though, of course, the poignancy of shame lessened after a while, it left its imprint on his face, as well as on his mind. They speculated about it at the office: "'G. Washington's' got a grouch on," one clerk said; "probably told the truth and lost a transfer! Let's give him another hatchet."

And the friendly people at the boarding house noticed the change in him. He had almost nothing to say, now, at dinner—no more jokes with the school-teacher, no more eager talks with the gray-haired woman....

"Has she forbidden conversation, do you suppose?" Miss Moore asked, giggling; but the widow said, soberly, that she was afraid Mr. Curtis was troubled about something. Mrs. Newbolt saw that there was something wrong with him, and talked of it to Eleanor, without a pause, for an hour. And of course Eleanor felt a difference in him; all day long, in the loneliness of their third-floor front, under the gaze of Daniel Webster, she brooded over it. Even while she was reading magazines and plodding through newspaper editorials on public questions she had never heard of, so that she could find things to talk about to him, she was thinking of the change, and asking herself what she had done—or left undone—to cause it? She also asked him:

"Maurice! Something bothers you! I'm not enough for you. What is the matter?"

He said, shortly, "Nothing."

At which she retreated into the silence of hurt feelings. Once, she knelt down, her face hidden on the grimy bed-spread, and prayed: "God, please give us a child—that will make him happy. And show me what to do to please him! Show me! Oh, show me! I'll do anything!" And who can say that her prayer was not answered? For certainly an idea did spring into her mind: those tiresome people downstairs—he liked to talk to them;—to Miss Moore, who giggled, and tried, Eleanor thought, to seem learned; and to the elderly woman who told stories. How could he enjoy talking to them when he could talk to her? But he did. So, suppose she tried to be more sociable with them? "I might invite Mrs. Davis to come up to our room some evening—and I would sing for her? ... But not Miss Moore; she is too silly, with her jokes!" Her mind strained to find ways to be friendly with these people he seemed to like. And circumstances helped her....

That was the month of the great eclipse. For a week Miss Ladd's boarders had talked about it, exchanging among themselves much newspaper astronomical misinformation—which the learned Miss Moore good-naturedly corrected. It was her suggestion that the household should make a night of it: "Let's all go up on the roof and see the show!" So the friendly gayety was planned—a supper in the basement dining room at half past eleven—ginger ale! ice cream! chocolate! Then an adjournment en masse to the top of the house. Of course Miss Moore, engineering the affair, invited the Curtises, confident of a refusal—and an acceptance;—both of which, indeed, she secured; but, to her astonishment, it was Mr. Curtis who declined, and his wife who accepted.

"It's a bore," Maurice told Eleanor, listlessly.

She looked worried: "Oh, I am so sorry! I told them at luncheon that we would come. I thought you'd enjoy it" (Her acceptance, which had been a real sacrifice to her, was a bomb to the other boarders. "What has happened?" they said to each other, blankly. "She'll be an awful wet blanket," some one said, frowning; and some one else said, "She's accepted because she won't let him out at night, alone!")

When the heterogeneous household gathered in the dining room, and corks popped and jokes were made, Eleanor and Maurice were there; he, watching the other people eat and drink and saying almost nothing; she, talking nervously and trying hard to be slangy about astronomy. Once he looked at her with faint interest—for she was so evidently "trying"! At midnight they all toiled up four flights of stairs from the basement to the garret, where, with proper squeamishness on the part of the ladies, and much gallantry of pushing and pulling on the part of the gentlemen, and all sorts of awkwardnesses and displaying of legs, they climbed a ladder and got out through the scuttle on to the flat roof. Then came the calculating of minutes, and facetiousness as to other people's watches and directions as to what one might expect to see. "It'll look like a bite out of a cookie, when it begins," the bond salesman said; and Miss Ladd tittered, and said what the ladies wanted to see was the man in the moon!

Maurice, intolerably irked, had moved across to the parapet and was staring out over the city. Below him spread the dim expanse of roofs and chimneys, with here and there the twinkle of light in an attic window. Leaning on the coping and looking down, he thought of the humanity under the dark roofs: a horizontal humanity—everybody asleep! The ugly fancy came to him that if that sleeping layer of bodies could be stirred up, there would be instantly a squirming mass of loathsome thoughts—maggots of lust, and shame, and jealousy, and fear. "My God! we're a nasty lot," he thought.

"Look!" a voice said at his shoulder. He sighed, impatiently—and looked. Above him soared the abyss of space, velvet black, pricked faintly here and there by stars; and, riding high—eternal and serene—the Moon.

He heard Miss Moore say, "It's beginning." ... And the solemn curve of the Shadow touched the great disk. No one spoke: they stood—a handful of little human creatures, staring up into immensity; specks of consciousness on a whirling ball that was rushing forever into the void, and, as it rushed, its shadow, sweeping soundless through the emptiness of Space, touched the watching Moon ... and the broad plaque, silver gilt, lessened—lessened. To half. To a quarter. To a glistening line. Then coppery darkness.

No one spoke. The flow of universes seemed to sweep personality out upon eternal tides. Yet, strangely, Maurice felt a sudden uprush of personality! ... Little he was—oh, infinitely little; too little, of course, to be known by the Power that could do this—spread out the heavens, and rule the deeps of Space; and yet he felt, somehow, near to the Power. "It's what they call God, I suppose?" he said. It flashed into his mind that he had said almost exactly the same thing that day in the field (when he was a fool), of the fire of joy in his breast: he had said that Happiness was God! And some people thought this stupendous Energy could know—us? Absurd! "Might as well say a man could know an ant." Yet, just because Inconceivable Greatness was great, mightn't it know Inconceivable Littleness? "The smaller I am—the nastier, the meaner, the more contemptible—the greater It would have to be to know me? To say I was too little for It to know about, would be to set a limit to Its greatness." How foolish Reason looks, limping along behind such an intuition—Intuition, running and leaping, and praising God! Maurice's reason strained to follow Intuition: "If It knows about me, It could help me, ... because It holds the stars. Why! It could fix things—with Eleanor!" Looking up into the gulf, his tiny misery suddenly fell away. "It would just prove Its greatness, to help me!" While he groped thus for God among the stars, the order of rushing worlds brought light, just as it had brought darkness: first a gleam; then a curving thread; then a silver sickle; then, magnificently! a shield of light—and the moon's unaltered face looked down at them. Maurice had an overwhelming impulse to drop his weakness into endless, ageless, limitless Power; his glimmer of self-knowledge, into enormous All-Knowledge; his secrecy into Truth. An impulse to be done with silences. "God knows; so Eleanor shall know." The idea of telling the truth was to Maurice—slipping and sinking into bottomless lying—like taking hold upon the great steadinesses of the sky....

People began to talk; Maurice did not hear them. Miss Ladd made a joke; Miss Moore said something about "light miles"; the old, sad, clever woman said, "The firmament showeth his handiwork,"—and instantly, as though her words were a signal—a voice, as silvery as the moon, broke the midnight with a swelling note:

"The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky ..."

A shock of attention ran through the watchers on the roof: Eleanor, standing with her hands clasped lightly in front of her, her head thrown back, her eyes lifted to the unplumbed deeps, was singing:

"The moon takes up the wondrous tale And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth; Whilst all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets in their turn—"

A window was thrown open in a dark garret below, and some one, unseen, listened. Down in the street, two passers-by paused, and looked up. No one spoke. The voice soared on—and ended:

"Forever singing as they shine...."

Maurice came to her side and caught her hand. There was a long sigh from the little group. For several minutes no one spoke. Miss Moore wiped her eyes; the baseball fan said, huskily, "My mother used to sing that"; the widow touched Eleanor's shoulder. "My—my husband loved it," she said, and her voice broke.

The garret window slammed down; the two people in the street vanished in the darkness. The little party on the roof melted away; they climbed through the scuttle, forgetting to joke, but saying to each other, in lowered voices: "Would you have believed it?" "How wonderful!" And to Eleanor, rather humbly: "It was beautiful, Mrs. Curtis!"

In their own room, Maurice took his wife in his arms and kissed her. "I am going to tell her," he said to himself, calmly. The overwhelming grandeur of the heavens had washed him clean of fear, clean even of shame, and left him impassioned with Beauty and Law, which two are Truth. "I will tell her," he said.

Eleanor had sung without self-consciousness; but now, when they were back again in their room—so stifling after those spaces between the worlds!—self-consciousness flooded in: "I suppose it was queer?" she said.

"It was perfect," Maurice said; he was very pale.

"I wanted to do something that they would like, and I thought they might like a hymn? Some of them said they did. But if you liked it, that is all I want."

"I loved it." His heart was pounding in his throat.... "Eleanor" (he could hardly see that terrible path among the stars, but he stumbled upward), "Eleanor, I'm not good enough for you."

"Not good enough? For me?" She laughed at such absurdity. He was sitting down, his elbow on his knee, his head in his hand. She came and knelt beside him. "If you are only happy! I did it to make you happy."

She heard him catch his breath. "How much do you love me?" he said.

(Oh, how long it was since he had talked that way—asking the sweet, unanswerable question of happy love!—how long since he had spoken with so much precious foolishness!) "How much? Why, Maurice, I love you so that sometimes, when I see you talking to other people—even these tiresome people here in the house, I could just die! I want you all to myself! I—I guess I feel about you the way Bingo feels about me," she said, trying to joke—but there were tears in her eyes.

"I'm not always ... what I ought to be," he said; "I am not—" (the path was very dim)—"awfully good. I—"

"I suppose I'm naturally jealous," she confessed; "I could die for you, Maurice; but I couldn't share your little finger! Do you remember, on our wedding day, you made me promise to be jealous? Well, I am." She laughed—and he was dumb. There, on the roof, Truth seemed as inevitable as Law. It did not seem inevitable now. He had lost his way among the stars. He could not find words to begin his story. But words overflowed on Eleanor's lips!... "Sometimes I get to thinking about myself—I am older than you, you know, a little. Not that it matters, really; but when I see you with other people, and you seem to enjoy talking to them—it nearly kills me! And you do like to talk to them. You even like to talk to—Edith, who is rude to me!" Her words poured out sobbingly: "Why, why am I not enough for you? You are enough for me!"

He was silent.

"And ... and ... and we haven't a baby," she said in a whisper, and dropped her face on his knee.

He tried to lift her, but his soul was sinking within him; dropping down—down from the awful heights. Yet still he caught at Truth! "Dear, don't! As for people, I may talk to them; I may even—even be with them, or seem to like them, and—and do things, that—I don't love anybody but you, Eleanor; but I—I—"

It was a final clutch at the Hand that holds the stars. But his entreating voice broke, for she was kissing his confession from his lips. Those last words—"I don't love anybody but you"—folded her in complete content! "Dear," she said, "that's all I want—that you don't love anybody but me." She laid her wet cheek against his in silence.

What could he do but be silent, too? What could he do but choke down the confessing, redeeming words that were on his lips? So he did choke them down, turning his back on the clean freedom of Truth; and the burden of his squalid secret, which he had been ready to throw away forever, was again packed like some corroding thing in his soul....

When, late in August, he and Eleanor went to Green Hill for a few days vacation, the effect of this repression was marked. There were wrinkles on his forehead under the thatch of his blond hair; his blue eyes were dulled, and he was taciturn to the point of rudeness—except to Eleanor. He was very polite to Eleanor. He never, now, amused himself by imagining how he could disappear if he had the luck to be in a theater fire. He knew that because he had enslaved himself to a lie, he had lost the right even to dream freedom. So there were no more "fool thoughts" as to how a man might "kick over the traces." There was nothing for him to do, now (he said), but "play the game." The Houghtons were uneasily aware of a difference in him; and Edith, fifteen now, felt that he had changed, and had fits of shyness with him. "He's like he was that night on the river," she told herself, "when he gave the lady his coat." She sighed when she said this, and it occurred to her that she would be a missionary. "I won't get married," she thought; "I'll go and nurse lepers. He's exactly like Sir Walter Raleigh."

But of course she had moments of forgetting the lepers—moments when she came down to the level of people like Johnny Bennett. When this happened, she thought that, instead of going to the South Seas, she would become a tennis star and figure in international tournaments; even Johnny admitted that she served well—for a girl. One day she confessed this ambition to Maurice, but he immediately beat her so badly that she became her old childlike, grumpy self, and said Johnny was nicer for singles; which enabled Maurice to turn her loose on John and go off alone to climb the mountain. He had a dreary fancy for looking at the camp, and living over again those days when he was still young—and a fool, of course; but not so great a fool as now, with Lily living in a little flat in Mercer. Batty's lease had expired, and she had moved into a cheaper, but still ornate, apartment house on the other side of the river. Well! Lily had floated into his life as meaninglessly as a mote floats into a streak of light, and then floated out again. He hadn't seen her since—since that time in May.

"Ass—ass!" he said to himself. "If Eleanor knew," he thought, "there'd be a bust-up in two minutes." He even smiled grimly to think of that evening of the eclipse when, shaken by the awful beauty of eternal order, he had, for just one high moment, dreamed that he, too, could attain the orderliness of Truth—and tell Eleanor. "Idiot!" he said, contemptuously. Probably Maurice touched his lowest level when he said that; for to be ashamed of an aspiration, to be contemptuous of emotion, is to sin against the Holy Ghost.

When Maurice reached the camp he stood for a while looking about him. The shack had not wintered well: the door sagged on a broken hinge, and the stovepipe had blown over and lay rusting on the roof. In the blackened circle of stones were some charred logs, which made him think of the camp fire on that night of Eleanor's courage and love and terror. He even reverted to those first excuses for her: "She nearly killed herself for me. Nervous prostration, Doctor Bennett said. I suppose a woman never gets over that. Poor Eleanor!" he said, softening; "it would kill her ... if she knew." He sat down and looked off across the valley ... "What am I going to do?" he said to himself. "I can't make her happy; I'd like to, but you can't reason with her any more than if she was a child. Edith has ten times her sense! How absurd she is about Edith. Lord! what would she do if she knew about Lily!"

He reflected, playing with the mere horror of the thought, upon just how complete the "bust-up" would be if she knew! He realized that he had undeserved good luck with Lily; she hadn't fastened herself on him. She was decent about that; if she'd been a different sort, he might have had a nasty time. But Lily was a sport—he'd say that for her; she hadn't clawed at him! And she had protested that she didn't want any money, and wouldn't take it! And she hadn't taken it. He had made some occasional presents, but nothing of any value. He had given her nothing, hardly even a thought (except the thought that he was an ass), since last May. Thinking of her now, he had another of those pangs of shame which had stabbed him so at first, but to which of late he had grown callous. The shame of having been the one—after all his goody-goody talk!—to pull her off the track; still, she was straight again now. He was quite sure of that. "You can tell when they're straight," he thought, heavily. Perhaps, in the winter, he would send her some flowers. He thought of the bulbs on the window sill of Lily's parlor, and tried to remember a verse; something about—about—what was it?

"If of thy store there be But left two loaves, Sell one, and with the dole Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul."

He laughed; Lily, feeding her "soul"! "Well, she has more 'soul,' with her flower pots and her good cooking, than some women who wouldn't touch her with a ten-foot pole! Still, I'm done with her!" he thought. But he had no purpose of "uplift"; the desire to reform Lily had evaporated. "Queer; I don't care a hoot," he told himself, watching with lazy eyes the smoke from his pipe drift blue between himself and the valley drowsing in the heat. "I'd like to see the little thing do well for herself—but really I don't give a damn." His moral listlessness, in view of the acuteness of that first remorse, and especially of that moment among the stars, when he had stretched out hands passionately eager for the agonizing sacrament of confession, faintly surprised him. How could he have been so wrought up about it? He looked off over the valley—saw the steely sickle of the river; saw a cloud shadow touch the shoulder of a mountain and move down across the gracious bosom of its forests. Below him, chestnuts twinkled and shimmered in the sun, and there were dusky stretches of hemlocks, then open pastures, vividly green from the August rains.... "It ought to be set to music," he thought; the violins would give the flicker of the leaves—"and the harps would outline the river. Eleanor's voice is lovely ... she looks fifty. How," he pondered, interested in the mechanics of it, "did she ever get me into that wagon?" Then, again, he was sorry for her, and said, "Poor girl!" Then he was sorry for himself. He knew that he was tired to death of Eleanor—tired of her moods and her lovemaking. He was not angry with her; he did not hate her;—he had injured her too much to hate her; he was simply unutterably tired of her—what he did hate, was this business of lugging a secret around! "I feel," he said to himself, "like a dog that's killed a hen, and had the carcass tied around his neck." His face twitched with disgust at his own simile. But as for Eleanor, he had been contemptibly mean to her, and, "By God!" he said to himself, "at least I'll play the game. I'll treat her as well as I can. Other fools have married jealous women, and put up with them. But, good Lord!" he thought, with honest perplexity, "can't the women see how they push you into the very thing they are afraid of, because they bore you so infernally? If I look at a woman, Eleanor's on her ear.... Queer," he pondered; "she's good. Look how kind she is to old O'Brien's lame child. And she can sing." He hummed to himself a lovely Lilting line of one of Eleanor's songs. "Confound it! why did I meet Lily? Eleanor is a million times too good for me...."

Far off he heard a sound and, frowning, looked toward the road: yes; somebody was coming! "Can't a man get a minute to himself?" Maurice thought, despairingly. It was the mild-eyed and spectacled Johnny Bennett, and behind him, Edith, panting and perspiring, and smiling broadly.

"Hello!" she called out, in cheerful gasps; "thought we'd come up and walk home with you!"

"'Lo," Maurice said.

The boy and girl achieving the rocky knoll on which Maurice was sitting, his hands locked about his knees, his eyes angry and ashamed, staring over the treetops, sat down beside him. Johnny pulled out his pipe, and Edith took off her hat and fanned herself. "Mother and Eleanor went for a ride. I thought I'd rather come up here."

"Um—" Maurice said.

"Two letters for you," she said. "Eleanor told me to bring 'em up. Might be business."

As she handed them to him, his eye caught the address on one of them, and a little cold tingle suddenly ran down his spine. Lily had never written to him, but some instinct warned him that that cramped handwriting on the narrow lavender envelope, forwarded from the office, could only be hers. A whiff of perfumery made him sure. He had a pang of fright. At what? He could not have said; but even before he opened the purple envelope he knew the taste of fear in his mouth....

Sitting there on the mountain, looking down into the misty serenities of the sun-drenched valley, with the smoke of Johnny Bennett's pipe in his nostrils, and the friendly Edith beside him, he tore open the scented envelope, and as his eyes fell on the first lines it seemed as if the spreading world below rose up and hit him in the face:

DEAR FRIEND CURT,—I don't know what you'll say. I hope you won't be mad. I'm going to have a baby. It's yours....

Maurice could not see the page, a wave of nausea swamped even his horror; he swallowed—swallowed—swallowed. Edith heard him gasp, and looked at him, much interested.

"What's the matter with your hands?" Edith inquired. "Johnny! Look at his hands!"

Maurice's fingers, smoothing out the purple sheet, were shaking so that the paper rustled. He did not hear her. Then he read the whole thing through to its laconic end:

It's yours—honest to God. Can you help me a little? Sorry to trouble you on your vacation.

Your friend,

LILY.

"What is the matter with your hands?" Edith said, very much interested.



CHAPTER XI

When, a year after his marriage, Maurice began to awaken to Eleanor's realities, maturity had come to him with a bound. But it was almost age that fell upon him when Lily's realities confronted him. In the late afternoon, as he and Edith and the silent Johnny walked down the mountain, he was dizzy with terror of Lily!

She was blackmailing him.

But even as he said the word, he had an uprush of courage; he would get a lawyer, and shut her up! That's what you do when anybody blackmails you. Perfectly simple. "A lawyer will shut her up!" It was a hideous mess, and he had no money to spend on lawyers; but it would never get out—the newspapers couldn't get hold of it—because a lawyer would shut her up! Though, probably, he'd have to give her some money? How much would he have to give her? And how much would he have to pay the lawyer? He had a crazy vision of Lily's attaching his salary. He imagined a dialogue with his employer: "A case of blackmail, sir." "Don't worry about it, Curtis; we'll shut her up." This brought an instant's warm sense of safety, which as instantly vanished—and again he was walking down the road, with Edith beside him, talking, talking... Eleanor would have to know... No! She wouldn't! He could keep it a secret. But he'd have to tell Mr. Houghton. Then Mrs. Houghton would know! Again a wave of nausea swept over him, and he shuddered; then said to himself: "No: Uncle Henry's white. He won't even tell her."

Edith was asking him something; he said, "Yes," entirely at random—and was at once involved in a snarl of other questions, and other random answers. Under his breath he thought, despairingly, "Won't she ever stop talking! ... Edith, I'll give you fifty cents if you'll keep quiet."

Edith was willing enough to be quiet; "But," she added, practically, "would you mind giving me the fifty cents now, Maurice? You always tear off to Eleanor the minute you get home, and I'm afraid you'll forget it."

He put his hand in his pocket and produced the half dollar. "Anything to keep you still!" he said.

"You don't mind if I talk to Johnny?"

He didn't answer; at that moment he was not aware of her existence, still less Johnny's, for a frightful thought had stabbed him: Suppose it wasn't blackmail? Suppose Lily had told the truth? Suppose "it" was his? "She can't prove it—she can't prove it!" he said, aloud.

"Prove what? Who can't?" Edith said, interested.

Maurice didn't hear her. Suddenly he felt too sick to follow his own thought, and go to the bottom of things; he was afraid to touch the bottom! He made a desperate effort to keep on the surface of his terror by saying: "It's all Eleanor's fault. Damnation! Her idiotic jealousy drove me out of the house that Sunday afternoon!"

At this moment Johnny Bennett and Edith broke into shrieks of laughter. "Say, Maurice," Johnny began—

"Can't you children be quiet for five minutes?" Maurice said. Johnny whistled and, behind his spectacles, made big eyes at Edith. "What's he got on his little chest?" Johnny inquired. But Maurice was deaf to sarcasm.... "It all goes back to Eleanor!"

Under the chatter of the other two, it was easier to say this than to say, "Is Lily telling the truth?" It was easier to hate Eleanor than to think about Lily. And, hating, he said again, aloud, the single agonized word.

Edith stood stock-still with amazement; she could not believe her ears. Maurice had said—? As for Maurice, his head bent as if he were walking in a high wind he strode on, leaving her in the road staring after him.

"Johnny!" said Edith; "did you hear?"

"That's nothing," Johnny said; "I say it often, when mother ain't round. At least I say the first part."

"Oh, Johnny!" Edith said, dismayed.

To Maurice, rushing on alone, the relief of hating Eleanor was lost in the uprush of that ghastly possibility: "If it is mine?"

Something in him struggled to say: "If it is, why, then, I must—But it isn't!" Maurice was, for the moment, a horribly scared boy; his instinct was to run to cover at any cost. He forgot Edith, coming home by herself after Johnny should turn in at his own gate; he was conscious only of his need to be alone to think this thing out and decide what he must do. There was no possible privacy in the house. "If I go up to our room," he thought, frantically, "Eleanor'll burst in on me, and then she'll get on to it that there's something the matter!" Suddenly he remembered the chicken coop. "It's late. Edith won't be coming in." So he skulked around behind the house and the stable, and up the gravel path to the henhouse. Lifting the rusty latch, he stepped quietly into the dusky, feathery shelter. "I can think the damned business out, here," he thought. There was a scuffling "cluck" on the roosts, but when he sat down on an overturned box, the fowls settled into stillness and, except for an occasional sleepy squawk, the place was quiet. He drew a long breath, and dropped his chin on his fist. "Now I'll think," he said. Then, through the cobwebby windows, he saw in the yellowing west the new moon, and below it the line of distant hills. An old pine tree stretched a shaggy branch across the window, and he said to himself that the moon and the hills and the branch were like a Japanese print.

He took the letter out of his pocket—his very fingers shrinking as he touched it—and straining his eyes in the gathering dusk, he read it all through. Then he looked at the moon, which was sliding—sliding behind the pine. Yes, that ragged branch was very Japanese. If he hadn't gone out on the river that night with Edith, he would never have met Lily. The thing he had said on his wedding day, in the meadow, about "switches," flashed into his mind: "A little thing can throw the switches."

"Ten minutes in a rowboat," he said,—"and this!" One of the hens clucked. "I'll fight," he said. "Lots of men come up against this sort of thing, and they hand the whole rotten business over to a lawyer. I'll fight. Or I'll move.... Perhaps that's the best way? I'll just tell Eleanor we've got to live in New York. Damn it! she'd ask why? I'll say I have a job there. Lily'd never be able to find me in New York." The moon slipped out below the pine, and hung for a dim moment in the haze. Maurice's mind went through a long and involved plan of concealing his address from Lily when he moved to New York.... "But what would we live on while I was finding a job?" ... Suddenly thought stopped short; he just watched the moon, and listened to a muffled stir among the hens. Then he took out his knife, and began to cut little notches on the window sill. "I'll fight," he said, mechanically.

There were running steps on the gravel path, and instantly he was on his feet. He had the presence of mind to put his hand into a nest, so that when Edith came in she reproached him for getting ahead of her in collecting eggs.

"How many have you got? Two? Griselda was on the nest when I started up the mountain, but I thought there was another egg there?"

"Only one," he said, thickly, and handed it to her.

"Come on in the house," Edith commanded; "I suppose," she said, resignedly, "Eleanor is playing on the piano!" (Edith, as her adoration of Eleanor lessened, was frankly bored by her music.)

"All right," Maurice said, and followed her.

Edith asked no questions; Maurice's "word" on the road had sobered her too much for talk. "He's mad about something," she thought; "but I never heard Maurice say—that!" She didn't quite like to repeat what he had said, though Johnny had confessed to saying "part of it." "I don't believe he ever did," Edith thought; "he's putting on airs! But for Maurice to say all of it!—that was wrong," said Edith, gravely.

They went out of the henhouse together in silence. Maurice was saying to himself, "I might not be able to get a job in New York... I'll fight." Yet certain traditional decencies, slowly emerging from the welter of his rage and terror, made him add, "If it was mine, I'd have to give her something... But it isn't. I'll fight."

He was so absorbed that before he knew it he had followed Edith to the studio, where, in the twilight. Mr. and Mrs. Houghton were sitting on the sofa together, hand in hand, and Eleanor was at the piano singing, softly, old songs that her hosts loved.

"If," said Henry Houghton, listening, "heaven is any better than this, I shall consider it needless extravagance on the part of the Almighty,"—and he held his wife's hand against his lips. Maurice, at the door, turned away and would have gone upstairs, but Mr. Houghton called out: "Sit down, man! If I had the luck to have a wife who could sing, I'd keep her at it! Sit down!" Eleanor's voice, lovely and noble and serene, went on:

"To add to golden numbers, golden numbers! 0 sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!"

Maurice sat down; it was as if, after beating against crashing seas with a cargo of shame and fear, he had turned suddenly into a still harbor: the faintly lighted studio, the stillness of the summer evening, the lovely voice—the peace and dignity and safety of it all gave him a strange sense of unreality... Then, suddenly, he heard them all laughing and telling Eleanor they were sorry for her, to have such an unappreciative husband!—and he realized that the fatigue of terror had made him fall asleep. Later, when he came to the supper table, he was still dazed. He said he had a headache, and could not eat; instantly Eleanor's anxiety was alert. She suggested hot-water bags and mustard plasters, until Mr. Houghton said to himself: "How does he stand it? Mary must tell her not to be a mother to him—or a grandmother."

All that hot evening, out on the porch, Maurice was silent—so silent that, as they separated for the night, his guardian put a hand on his shoulder, "Come into the studio," he said; "I want to show you a thing I've been muddling over."

Maurice followed him into the vast, shadowy, untidy room ("No females with dusters allowed on the premises!" Henry Houghton used to say), glanced at a half-finished canvas, said, "Fine!" and turned away.

"Anything out of kilter? I mean, besides your headache?"

"Well ... yes."

("He's going to say he's hard up—the extravagant cuss!" Henry Houghton thought, with the old provoked affection.)

"I'm bothered about ... something," Maurice began.

("He's squabbled with Eleanor. I wish I was asleep!")

"Uncle Henry," Maurice said, "if you were going to see a lawyer, who would you see?"

"I wouldn't see him. Lawyers make their cake by cooking up other people's troubles. Sit down. Let's talk it out." He settled himself in a corner of the ragged old horsehair sofa which faced the empty fireplace and motioned Maurice to a chair. "I thought it wasn't all headache; what's the matter, boy?"

Maurice sat down, cleared his throat, and put his hands in his pockets so they would not betray him. "I—" he said.

Mr. Houghton appeared absorbed in biting off the end of his cigar.

"I—" Maurice said again.

"Maurice," said Henry Houghton, "keep the peace. If you and Eleanor have fallen out, don't stand on your dignity. Go upstairs and say you're sorry, whether you are or not. Don't talk about lawyers."

"My God!" said Maurice; "did you suppose it was that?"

Mr. Houghton stopped biting the end of his cigar, and looked at him. "Why, yes; I did. You and she are rather foolish, you know. So I supposed—"

Maurice dropped his face on his arms on the big dusty table, littered with pamphlets and charcoal studies and squeezed-out paint tubes. After a while he lifted his head: "That's nothing. I wish it was that."

The older man rose and stood with his back to the mantelpiece. They both heard the clock ticking loudly. Then, almost in a whisper, Maurice said:

"I've been—blackmailed."

Mr. Houghton whistled.

"I've had a letter from a woman. She says—"

"Has she got anything on you?"

"No proof; but—"

"But you have made a fool of yourself?"

"Yes."

Mr. Houghton sat down again. "Go on," he said.

Maurice reached for a maulstick lying across the table; then leaned over, his elbows on his knees, and tried, with two trembling forefingers, to make it stand upright on the floor. "She's common. She can't prove it's—mine." His effort to keep the stick vertical with those two shaking fingers was agonizing.

"Begin at the beginning," Henry Houghton said.

Maurice let the maulstick drop against his shoulder and sunk his head on his hands. Suddenly he sat up: "What's the use of lying? She's not bad all through." The truth seemed to tear him as he uttered it. "That's the worst of it," he groaned. "If she was, I'd know what to do. But probably she's not lying... She says it's mine. Yes; I pretty well know she's not lying."

"We'll go on the supposition that she is. I have yet to see a white crow. How much does she want?"

"She's only asked me to help her, when—it's born. And of course, if it is mine, I—"

"We won't concede the 'if.'"

"Uncle Henry," said the haggard boy, "I'm several kinds of a fool, but I'm not a skunk. I've got to be decent"

"You should have thought of decency sooner."

"I know. I know."

"You'd better tell me the whole thing. Then we'll talk lawyers."

So Maurice began the squalid story. Twice he stopped, choking down excuses that laid the blame on Eleanor.... "It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been—been bothered." And again, "Something had thrown me off the track; and I met Lily, and—"

At last it was all said, and he had not skulked behind his wife. He had told everything, except those explaining things that could not be told.

When the story was ended there was silence. The older man, guessing the untold things, could not trust himself to speak his pity and anger and dismay. But in that moment of silence the comfort of confession made the tears stand in the boy's eyes; he said, impulsively, "Uncle Henry, I thought you'd kick me out of the house!"

Henry Houghton blew his nose, and spoke with husky harshness. "Eleanor has no suspicions?" (He, too, was choking down references to Eleanor which must not be spoken.)

"No. Do you think I ought to—to tell—?"

"No! No! With some women you could make a clean breast... I know a woman—her husband hadn't a secret from her; and I know he was a fool before his marriage! He made a clean breast of it, and she married him. But she knew the soul of him, you see? She knew that this sort of rotten foolishness was only his body. So he worshiped her. Naturally. Properly. She meant God to him... Mighty few women like that! Candidly, I don't think your wife is one of them. Besides, this is after marriage. That's different, Maurice. Very different. It isn't a square deal."

Maurice made a miserable shamed sound of agreement. Then he said, huskily, "Of course I won't lie; I'll just—not tell her."

"The thing for us to do," said Mr. Houghton, "is to get you out of this mess. Then you'll keep straight? Some fellows wouldn't. You will, because—" he paused; Maurice looked at him with scared eyes—"because if a man is sufficiently aware of having been a damned fool, he's immune. I'll bet on you, Maurice."



CHAPTER XII

Yet Henry Houghton had moments of fearing that he would lose his bet, for Maurice was such a very damned fool! One might have guessed as much when he would not admit that Lily was lying. She might be blackmailing him, he said; she might be a "crow"; but she wasn't lying. When his guardian had talked it all out with him, and written a letter which Maurice was to take to a lawyer ("she'll want to get rid of the child; they always want to get rid of the child; so she may let you off easier if you say you'll see that it is cared for; and we'll have Hayes put it in black and white") when all these arrangements had been made, Maurice almost dished the whole thing (so Mr. Houghton expressed it) by saying—again as if the words burst up from some choked well of truthfulness:

"Uncle Henry, it isn't blackmail; and—and I've got to be half decent!"

Down from the upper hall came a sweet, anxious voice: "Maurice, darling! It's twelve o'clock! What are you doing?"

Mr. Houghton called back: "We're talking business, Eleanor. I'll send him up in a quarter of an hour. Don't lose your beauty sleep, my dear. (Mary must tell her not to be such an idiot!)" Then he looked at Maurice: "My boy, you can't be decent with a leech. You've got to leave this to Hayes."

"She isn't a leech. I ought to help her, I'll see her myself."

"My dear fellow, don't be a bigger ass than you can help! You can meet what you see fit to call your responsibilities, as a few other conscientious fools have done before you; though," he added, heavily, "I hope she won't suck you dry! How you are going to squeeze out the money, I don't know! I can't help you much. But you mustn't appear in this for a single minute. Hayes will see her, and buy her off."

Maurice shook his head, despairingly: "Uncle Henry, she's common; but she's not vicious. She's a nice little thing. I know Lily! I'll see her. I'll have to! I'll tell her I'll—I'll help her." No wonder poor Henry Houghton feared he would lose his bet! "I know you think I'm easy meat," Maurice said; "but I'm not. Only," his face was anguished, "I've got to be half decent."

It was after one o'clock when the two men went upstairs, though there had been another summons over the banisters: "Maurice! Why don't you come to bed?" When they parted at Maurice's door, Mr. Houghton struck his ward on the shoulder and whispered, "You're more than half decent. I'll bet on you!" and Maurice whispered back:

"You're white, Uncle Henry!"

He went into his room on tiptoe, but Eleanor heard him and said, sleepily, "What on earth have you been talking about?"

"Business," Maurice told her.

"Who was your lavender-colored letter from?" Eleanor said, yawning; "I forgot to ask you. It was awfully scented!"

There was an instant's pause; Maurice's lips were dry;—then he said:

"From a woman... About a house. (My God! I've lied to her!)" he said to himself...

Mary Houghton, reading comfortably in bed, looked up at her old husband over her spectacles. "I've heated some cocoa, dear," she said. "Drink it before you undress; you are worn out. What kept you downstairs until this hour?"

"Business."

Mary Houghton smiled: "Might as well tell the truth."

"Oh, Kit, it's a horrid mess!" he groaned; "I thought that boy had got to the top of Fool Hill when he married Eleanor! But he hadn't."

"Can't tell me, I suppose?"

"No. Mary, mayn't I have a cigar? I'm really awfully used up, and—"

"Henry! You are perfectly depraved! No; you may not. Drink your cocoa, honey. And consider the stars;—they shine, even above Fool Hill. And 'messes' look mighty small beside the Pleiades!" Then she turned a page of her novel, and added, "Poor Eleanor."

"I don't know why you say 'Poor Eleanor'!"

"Because I know that Maurice isn't sharing his 'mess' with her."

"You are uncanny!" Henry Houghton said, stirring his cocoa and looking at her admiringly.

"No; merely intelligent. Henry, don't let him have any secrets from Eleanor! Tell him to tell her. She'll forgive him."

"She's not that kind, Mary."

"Dear, almost every woman is 'that kind'! It's deception, not confession, that makes them—the other kind. If Maurice will confess—"

"I haven't said there was anything to confess," he protested, in alarm.

"Oh no; certainly not. You haven't said a word! (Well; you may have just one of those little cigars—you poor dear!) Henry, listen: If Maurice hangs a secret round his neck it will drown him."

"If Eleanor would make cocoa for him at one o'clock in the morning there would be no chance for secrets. Kit, I have long known that you are the wisest, as well as the most virtuous and most lovable of your sex, and that I shall only get to heaven by hanging on to your petticoats; but in this one particular I am much more intelligent than you."

"Heaven send you a good opinion of yourself!" his wife murmured.

But he insisted. "On certain subjects women prefer to be lied to."

"Did any woman ever tell you so?" she inquired, dryly.

He shrugged his shoulders, put his cup down, and came over to give her a kiss.

"Which is to say, 'Hold your tongue'?" his Mary inquired.

"Oh, never!" he said, and in spite of his distress he laughed; but he looked at her tenderly. "The Lord was good to me, Mary, when He made you take me."

That talk in the studio marked the moment when Maurice Curtis turned his back on youth. It was the beginning of the retreat of an ardent and gayly candid boy into the adult sophistications of Secrecy. The next day when he and Eleanor returned to Mercer, he sat in the car watching with unseeing eyes the back of her head,—her swaying hat, the softly curling tendrils of dark hair in the nape of her neck—and he saw before him a narrow path, leading—across quaking bogs of evasions!—toward a goal of always menaced safety. Mr. Houghton had indicated the path in that midnight talk, and Maurice's first step upon it would be his promise to relieve Lily of the support of her child—"on condition that she would never communicate with him again." After that, Henry Houghton said, "the lawyer will clinch things; and nobody will ever be the wiser!" Because Eleanor was the woman she was, he saw no way of escape for Maurice, except through this bog of secrecy, where any careless step might plunge him into a lie. He had not dared to point out that other path, which his Mary thought so much safer than the sucking shakiness of the swamp—the rough and terrible path of confession, which lies across the firm aridities of Truth, and leads to that orderly freedom of the stars to which Maurice had once aspired! So now the boy was going back to Mercer to plunge into the pitfalls and limitless shades of concealment. He did it with a hard purpose of endurance, without hope, and also without complaint.

"If I can just avoid out-and-out lying," he told himself, "I can take my medicine. But if I have to lie—!"

He knew the full bitterness of his medicine when he went to see Lily...

He went the very next day, after office hours... There had been a temptation to postpone the taking of the medicine, because it had been difficult to escape from Eleanor. The well-ordered household at Green Hill had fired her with an impulse to try housekeeping again, and she wanted to urge the idea upon Maurice:

"We would be so much more comfortable; and I could have little Bingo!"

"We can't afford it," he said. (Oh, how many things he wouldn't be able to afford, now!)

"It wouldn't cost much more. I'll come down to the office this afternoon and walk home with you, and tell you what I've thought out about it."

Maurice said he had to—to go and see an apartment house at five.

"That's no matter! I'll meet you and walk along with you."

"I have several other places to go."

That hurt her. "If you don't want me—"

He was so absorbed that her words had no meaning to him. "Good-by," he said, mechanically—and the next moment he was on his way.

At the office his employer gave him a keen glance. "You look used up, Curtis; got a cold?" Mr. Weston asked, kindly.

Maurice, sick in spirit, said, "No, sir; I'm all right."

And so the minutes of the long day ticked themselves away, each a separate pang of disgust and shame, until five o'clock came, and he started for Lily's.

While he waited in the unswept vestibule of an incredibly ornate frame apartment house for the answer to his ring, and the usual: "My goodness! Is that you? Come on up!" he had the feeling of one who stands at a closed door, knowing that when he opens it and enters he will look upon a dead face. The door was Lily's, and the face was the face of his dead youth. Carelessness was over for Maurice, and irresponsibility. And hope, too, he thought, and enthusiasm, and ambition. All over! All dead. All lying stiff and still on the other side of a shiny golden-oak door, with its half window hung with a Nottingham lace curtain. When he started up the three flights of stairs to that little flat where he was to look upon his dead, he was calm to the point of listlessness. "My own fault. My own fault," he said.

She was waiting for him on the landing, her fresh cleanness in fragrant contrast to the forlorn untidiness of the stairways. They went into her parlor together and he began to speak at once.

"I got your letter. No; I won't sit down. I—"

"My soul and body! You're all in!" Lily said, startled, "Let me get you some whisky—"

"No, please, nothing! Lily, I'm ... awfully sorry, I—I'll do what I can. I—"

She put her hands over her face; he went on mechanically, with his carefully prepared sentences, ending with:

"There's no reason why we should meet any more. But I want you to know that the—the—it, will be taken care of. My lawyer will see you about it; I'll have it placed somewhere."

She dropped her hands and looked at him, her little, pretty face amazed and twitching: "Do you mean you'll take my baby?"

"I'll see that it's provided for."

"I ain't that kind of a girl!" They were standing, one on either side of a highly varnished table, on which, on a little brass tray, a cigarette stub was still smoldering. "I don't want anything out of you"—Lily paused; then said, "Mr. Curtis"—(the fact that she didn't call him "Curt" showed her recognition of a change in their relationship)—"I'm not on the grab. I can keep on at Marston's for quite a bit. All I want is just if you can help me in February? But I'll never give my baby up! My first one died."

"Your first—"

"So I'll never, never give it up!" Her shallow, honest, amber-colored eyes overflowed with bliss. "I'll just love it!" she said.

Maurice felt an almost physical collapse; neither he nor Henry Houghton had reckoned on maternal love. Mr. Houghton had implied that Lily's kind did not have maternal love. "She'll leave it on a convenient doorstep—unless she's a white blackbird," Henry Houghton had said. Maurice, too, had taken for granted Lily's eagerness to get rid of the child. In his amazement now, at this revelation of an unknown Lily—a white blackbird Lily!—he began, angrily, to argue: "It is impossible for you to keep it! Impossible! I won't permit it—"

"I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world! I'll take care of it. You needn't worry for fear I'll put it onto you."

"But I won't have you keep it! I promise you I'll look after it. You must go away, somewhere. Anywhere!"

"But I don't want to leave Mercer," she said, simply.

In his despairing confusion, he sat down on the little bowlegged sofa and looked at her; Lily, sitting beside him, put her hand on his—which quivered at the touch. "Don't you worry! I'd never play you any mean trick. You treated me good, and I'll never treat you mean; I 'ain't forgot the way you handed it out to Batty! I'll never let on to anybody. Say—I believe you're afraid I'll try a hold-up on you some day? Why, Mr. Curtis, I wouldn't do a thing like that—no, not for a million dollars! Look here; if it will make you easy in your mind, I'll put it down in writing; I'll say it ain't yours! Will that make you easy in your mind?" Her kind eyes were full of anxious pity for him. "I'll do anything for you, but I won't give up my baby."

She was trying to help him! He was so angry and so frightened that he felt sick at his stomach; but he knew that she was trying to help him!

"You see," she explained, "the first one died; now I'm going to have another, and you bet I'm going to have things nice for her! I'm going to buy a parlor organ. And I'll have her learned to play. It's going to be a girl. Oh, won't I dress her pretty! But I'll never come down on you about her. Now, don't you worry."

The generosity of her! She'd "put it down in writing"! "I told Uncle Henry she was white," he thought. But in spite of her whiteness his blue eyes were wide with horror; all those plans, of Lily in another city, and an unacknowledged child, in still another city—for of course it could not be in Mercer any more than Lily could!—all these safe arrangements faded into a swift vision of Lily, in this apartment, with it! Lily, meeting him on the street!—a flash of imagination showed him Lily, pushing a baby carriage! For just a moment sheer terror made that dead Youth of his stir.

"You can't keep it!" he said again, hoarsely; "I tell you, I won't allow it! I'll look after it. But I won't have it here! And I won't ever see you."

"You needn't," she said, reassuringly; "and I'll never bother you. That ain't me!"

He was dumb.

"An' look," she said, cheerfully; "honest, it's better for you. What would you do, looking after a little girl? Why, you couldn't even curl her hair in the mornings!" Maurice shuddered. "And I'll never ask you for a cent, if you can just make it convenient to help me in February?"

"Of course I'll help you," he said; then, suddenly, his anger fell into despair. "Oh, what a damned fool I was!"

"All gentlemen are," she tried to comfort him. Her generosity made him blush. Added to his shame because of what he had done to Eleanor, was a new shame at his own thoughts about this little, kind, bad, honest woman! "Look here," Lily said; "if you're strapped, never mind about helping me. They'll take you at the Maternity free, if you can't pay. So I'll go there; and I'll say I'm married; I'll say my husband was Mr. George Dale, and he's dead; I'll never peep your name. Now, don't you worry! I'll keep on at Marston's for four months, anyway. Yes; I'll buy me a ring and call myself Mrs. Dale; I guess I'll say Mrs. Robert Dale; Robert's a classier name than George. And nobody can say anything to my baby."