"Why not?" he said, sharply; "I like having her here. Besides, think of telling Uncle Henry we didn't want Edith next winter! If you have the nerve for that, I haven't." Eleanor had not the nerve; so when, at the end of June, Edith rushed home, it was understood that she would be with Maurice and Eleanor during the next term.... That was the summer that marked the seventh year of their marriage—and the fourth year of Jacky, over in the little frame house on Maple Street. But it was the first year of a knowledge, surprisingly delayed!—which came to Edith; namely, that Johnny Bennett was "queer."

It may have been this "queerness" which made her attach herself to Eleanor, who, in August, went to Green Hill for the usual two weeks' visit. Maurice had to go away on office business three or four times during that fortnight, but he came up for one Sunday. He had insisted upon Eleanor's going, because, he said, she needed the change. "Can't you come?" she pleaded. "Do take some extra time from the office!"

"And be docked? Can't afford it!" he said; "but I'll get one week-end in with you," he promised her, looking forward with real satisfaction to the solitude of his own house. So Eleanor, saying she couldn't understand why he was so awfully economical now that he had his own money!—came alone,—full of remorse at deserting him, and worry because of his loneliness, and leaving a pining Bingo behind her. But, to her silent annoyance, as soon as she arrived at Green Hill she encountered a new and tiresome attentiveness from Edith! Edith was inescapably polite. She did not urge upon Eleanor any of those strenuous amusements to which she and Johnny were devoted; she merely gave up the amusements, and, as Johnny expressed it, "stuck to Eleanor"! Eleanor couldn't understand it, and when Maurice at last arrived, Johnny's perplexity became audible:

"Perhaps," he told Edith, satirically, "you may be able, now, to tear yourself away from Eleanor, and go fishing with me? You fish pretty well—for a woman. Maurice can lug her round."

"I will, if Maurice will go, too," Edith said.

"What do you drag him in for?"—John paused; understanding dawned upon him: "She doesn't want to be by herself with me!" His tanned face slowly reddened, and those brown eyes of his behind the big spectacles grew keen. He didn't speak for quite a long time; then he said, very low, "I'll be here to-morrow morning at four-thirty. Be ready. I'll dig bait."

"All right," said Edith; after which, for the first time in her life, she played a shabby trick on Johnny Bennett; as soon as he had gone home, she invited Eleanor (who promptly declined), and Maurice (who as promptly accepted), to go fishing, too! Then, having got what she wanted, she reproached herself: "Johnny'll be mad as fury. But when he gets to saying things to me he makes me feel funny in the back of my neck. Besides, I want Maurice."

The fishermen were to assemble in the grayness of the August dawn; and Johnny was, as usual, prepared to throw a handful of gravel at Edith's window to hurry her downstairs. But when he loomed up in the mist, who should be on the porch, fooling with a rod, but Maurice!

"What's he butting in for?" Johnny thought, looking so cross that Edith, coming out with the luncheon basket, was really remorseful. "Hullo, Johnny," she said. ("I never played it on him before," she was thinking.) But at that moment her remorse was lost in alarm, for standing in the doorway was Eleanor, her hair caught up in a hurried twist, a wrapper over her shoulders, her bare feet thrust into pink bedroom slippers. (Forty-six looks fifty-six at 4.30 A.M.)

"Darling," Eleanor said, "I believe I'd like to go up to the cabin to-day. Do let's do it—just you and I!"

The three young people all spoke at once:

Johnny said: "Good scheme! We'll excuse Maurice."

Edith said, "Oh, Eleanor, Maurice loves fishing!"

And Maurice said: "I sort of think I'd like to catch a sucker or two in this pool Johnny is always cracking up. I bet he's in for a big jolt about his trout! You come, too?"

"I'd get so awfully tired. And I—I thought we could have a day together up on the mountain," she ended, wistfully.

There was a dead silence. Johnny was thinking: "Gosh! I hope she gets him." And Edith was thinking, "I'd like to choke her!" Maurice's thoughts could not be spoken; he merely said, "All right; if you want to."

"I don't believe I'll go fishing, either," Edith said.

Eleanor, on the threshold, turned quickly: "Please don't stay at home on my account!"

But Maurice settled it. "I'll not go," he said, patiently; "but you must, Edith." He threw down his rod and went into the house; Eleanor, in her flopping pink slippers, hurried after him....

"I did so want to have you to myself," she said; "you don't mind not going fishing with those children, do you?"

He said, listlessly: "Oh no. But don't let's attempt the cabin stunt." Then he stood at the window and watched Johnny and Edith, with fishing rods and lunch basket, disappear down the road into the fog. He was too bored to be irritated; he only counted the hours until he could get back to Mercer, and the office, and the table under the silver poplar. "I'll get hold of the Mortons, and Hannah can give us some sort of grub, and then we'll go to a show," he thought. "I can stick it out here for thirty-six hours more."

He stuck it out that morning by sitting in Mr. Houghton's studio, one leg across the arm of his chair, reading and smoking. Once Eleanor came in and asked him if he was all right. He said, briefly, "Yes."

But she was uneasy: "Maurice, I'll play tennis with you?"

This at least made him chuckle. "You? How long since? My dear, you couldn't play a set to save your life!"

After that she let him alone for a while. Early in the afternoon the need to make up to him for what she had done grew intolerable: "Darling, let's play solitaire?"

"I'm going to write letters."

She left him to his letters for an hour, then came again: "Let's walk!"

"Well, if you want to," Maurice said, and yawned. So they trudged off. Eleanor, walking very close to her husband, was thinking, heavily, how far they were apart; but she did her best to amuse him by anxious ponderings of household expenses. He, sheering off to the other side of the road to escape her intimate and jostling shoulder, was thinking of the expenses of another household, and making no effort whatever to amuse her. His silence confessed an irritation which she felt but could not understand; so by and by she fell silent, too, though the helpless tears stood in her eyes. Then, apparently, he put his annoyance, whatever it was, behind him.

"Nelly," he said, "let's go down by the West Branch and meet Edith and Johnny? They'll be coming home that way, 'laden with trout,' I suppose," he ended, sarcastically.

Eleanor began to say, "Oh no!" Then something, she didn't know what, made her say, "Well, all right." As they turned into the wood road that ran up toward the mountain, she said another unexpected thing:

"Maurice, I'm tired. I'll go home; you go on by yourself, and—and meet Johnny." She didn't know, herself, why she said it! Perhaps, it was just an effort to make up for what she had done in the morning?

Maurice, astonished, made some half-hearted protest; he would go back with her? But she said no, and walked home alone. Her throat ached with unshed tears. "He likes to be with her! He doesn't want me,—and I love him—I love him!"

* * * * *

The two youngsters had made a long day of it. On their way to the brook that morning, crashing through underbrush, climbing rotting rail fences that were hidden in docks and briers, balancing on the precarious slipperiness of mossy rocks, the triumphant Johnny, his heart warm with gratitude to Eleanor, had led his captive and irritated Edith. When they broke through low-hanging boughs and found the pool, the trout possibilities of which Johnny had so earnestly "cracked up," Edith was distinctly grumpy. "Eleanor is a selfish thing," she said. "Gimme a worm."

"I think Maurice would have been cussedly selfish not to do what she wanted," Johnny said; "my idea of marriage is that a man must do everything his wife wants."

"Maurice is never selfish! He's great, simply great!" Edith said.

"Oh, he's decent enough," Johnny admitted, then he paused, frowning, for he couldn't open his bait box; he banged it on a stone, pried his knife under the lid, swore at it—and turned very red. Edith giggled.

"Let me try," she said.

"No use; the rotten thing's stuck."

But she took it, shook it, gave an easy twist, and the maddening lid—loosened, of course, by Johnny's exertions—came off! Edith shrieked with joy; but Johnny, though mortified, was immensely relieved. They sat down on a sloping rock, and talked bait, and the grave and spectacled Johnny became his old self, scolding Edith for talking so loudly. "Girls," he said, "are born not fishermen!" Then they waded out into the stream, and began to cast. It was broad daylight by this time, and the woods were filling with netted sunbeams; the water whispered and chuckled.

"Pretty nice?" Johnny said, in a low voice; and Edith, all her grumpiness flown, said:

"You bet it is!" Then, as an afterthought, she called back, "But Eleanor is the limit!"

Johnny, forgetting his gratitude to Eleanor, said, savagely: "Keep quiet! You scared him off! Gosh! girls are awful."

So Edith kept quiet, and he wandered up the stream, and she wandered down the stream, and they fished, and they fished—and they never caught a thing.

"I had one bite," Johnny said when, at about eleven, fiercely hungry, they met on the bank where they had left their lunch basket; "but you burst out about Eleanor, and drove him off. Girls simply can't fish."

Edith was contrite—but doubted the bite. Then they sat down on a mossy rock, and ate stacks of sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and watched the water, and talked, talked, talked. At least Edith talked—mostly about Maurice. Johnny lit his pipe, puffed once or twice, then let it go out and sat staring into the green wall of the woods on the other side of the brook. Then, suddenly, quietly, he began to speak....

"I want to say something."

"The mosquitoes here are awful!" Edith said, nervously; "don't you think we'd better go home?"

"Look here, Edith; you've got to be half decent to me—unless, of course, you've soured on me? If you have, I'll shut up."

"Johnny, don't be an idiot! 'Course I haven't soured on you. You're the oldest friend I've got. Older than Maurice, even."

"Well, I guess I am an older friend than Maurice! But lately you've treated me like a dog. You skulk round to keep from being by ourselves. You never give me a chance to open my head to you—"

"Johnny, that's perfectly absurd! I've had to look after Eleanor—"

"Eleanor nothing! It's me you want to shake."

"I do not want to shake you! I'm just busy."

"Edith, I care a lot about you. I don't care much for girls, as a rule. But you're not girly. And every time I try to talk to you, you sidestep me."

"Now, Johnny—"

"But I'm going to tell you, all the same." He made a clutch at the sopping-wet hem of her skirt. "I will say it! I care an awful lot about you. I'm not a boy. I want to marry you."

There was a dead silence; then Edith said, despairingly, "Oh, Johnny, how perfectly horrid you are!" He gasped. "You simply spoil everything with this sort of ... of ... of talk."

"You mean you don't like me?" His face twitched.

"Like you? I like you awfully! That's why I'm so mad at you. Why, I'm awfully fond of you—"

"Edith!"

"I mean I never had a friend like you. I've always liked you ten times better than any silly old girl friend I ever had. I've liked you almost as much as Maurice. Of course I shall never like anybody as much as Maurice. He comes next to father and mother. But now you go and—and talk ... I just can't bear it," Edith said, and fumbled for her pocket handkerchief; "I hate talk." Her eyes overflowed.

"Edith! Look here; now, don't! Honestly, I can stand being turned down, but I can't stand—that. Edith, please! I never saw you do that—girl stunt. I'll never bother you again, if you'll just stop crying!"

Edith, unable to find her handkerchief, bent over and wiped her eyes on her dress. "I'm not crying," she said, huskily; "but—"

"I think," John Bennett said, "honestly, Edith, I think I've loved you all my life."

"And I have loved you," she said; "You are a lamb! Oh, Johnny, I'm perfectly crazy about you!"

His swiftly illuminating face made her add, hastily, "and now you go and spoil everything!"

"I won't spoil things, Skeezics," he said, gently; "oh, say, Edith, let up on crying! That breaks me all up."

But Edith, having discovered her handkerchief, was mopping very flushed cheeks and mumbling on about her own woes. "Why can't you be satisfied just to go on the way we always have? Why can't you be satisfied to have me like you almost as much as I like Maurice?"

"Maurice!" the young man said, with a helpless laugh. "Oh, Edith, you are several kinds of a goose! In the first place, Maurice is married; and in the second place, he's old enough to be your father—"

"He isn't old enough to be my father! And I shall never like anybody as much as Maurice, because there isn't anybody like him in the entire world. I've always thought he was exactly like Sir Walter Raleigh. Besides, I shall never marry anybody! But I mean, I don't see why it isn't enough for you to have me awfully fond of you?"

"Well, it isn't," Johnny said, briefly, "but don't you worry." He was white, but his tenderness was like a new sense. Edith had never seen this Johnny. Her entirely selfish impatience turned to shyness. "Edith," he said, very gently, "you don't understand, dear. You're awfully young—younger than your age. I didn't take in how young you were—talking about Maurice! I suppose it's because you know so few girls, that you are so young. Well; I can't hang round with you any more, as if we were ten years old. You see, I—I love you, Edith. That makes the difference ... dear."

"Oh," said Edith, desperately, "how perfectly horrid—" She looked really distracted, poor child! (but that was the moment when her preposterous youthfulness ceased.) She jumped to her feet so suddenly that Johnny, who had begun, his fingers trembling, to scrape out the bowl of his pipe, dropped his jackknife, which rolled down the steeply sloping rock into the water. "Oh, I'm so sorry!" Edith said.

John sighed. "Oh, that's nothing," he said, and slid over the moss and ferns to the water's edge; there, lying flat on his stomach, his sleeve rolled up, he thrust his bare white arm into the dark and troutless depths of the pool, and salvaged his knife. Edith, on the bank, began furiously to pack up. When Johnny climbed back to her she said she wanted to go home, "now!"

"All right," he said again, gently.

So, silently, they started homeward; and never in her life had Edith been so glad to see any human creature as she was to see Maurice on the West Branch Road! But she let him do all the talking. To herself she was saying, "It's all Eleanor's fault for not letting him come this morning! I just hate her!..."

That night her father said to her mother, rather sadly, "Mary, our little girl has grown up. Johnny Bennett is casting sheep's eyes at her."

"Nonsense!" said Mary Houghton, comfortably; "she's a perfect child, and so is he."



CHAPTER XIX

Curiously enough, though Edith's mother did not recognize what was going on between "the children," Eleanor did. When she came back to Mercer, a week later, she overflowed about it to Maurice. "Calf love!" she summed it up.

"She didn't look down on that kind of love seven years ago," he thought, cynically. But he didn't say so; no matter what his thoughts were, he was always kind to Eleanor. Lily, over in Medfield; Lily, in the small, secret house; Lily, with the good-looking little boy—blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, blond-haired!—the squalid memory of Lily, said to him, over and over: "You are a confounded liar; so the least you can do is to be decent to Eleanor."

So he was kind.

"I couldn't bear myself," he used to think, "if I wasn't—but, O Lord!"

That "O Lord!" was his summing up of a growing and demoralizing sense of the worthlessness and unreality of life. Like Solomon (and all the rest of us, who see the universe as a mirror for ourselves!) he appraised humanity at his valuation of himself. He didn't use Solomon's six words, but the eight of his generation were just as exact—"The whole blooming outfit is a rotten lie! If," he reflected, "deceit isn't on my 'Lily' line, it is on a thousand other lines." From the small cowardices of appreciations and admirations which one did not really feel, up through the bread-and-butter necessities of business, on into the ridiculousness of what is called "Democracy" or "Liberty"—on, even, into those emotional evasions of logic and reason labeled "Religion"—all lies—all lies! he told himself. "And I," he used to think, looking back on seven years of marriage, "I am the most accomplished liar of the whole shootin' match!... If they get off that G. Washington gag on me any more at the office, somebody'll get their head punched."

All the same, even if he did say, "O Lord!" he was carefully kind to his boring wife.

But when Edith (suddenly grown up, it seemed to Maurice) came back for the fall term, he said "O Lord!" less frequently. The world began to seem to him a less rotten place. "Nice to have you round again, Skeezics!" he told her; and Eleanor, listening, went up to her room, and sat with her fingers pressed hard on her eyes. "It's dreadful to have her around! How can I get rid of her?" she thought. Very often now the flame of jealousy flared up; it scorched her whenever she recognized Edith's "brains," whenever she noticed some gay fearlessness, or easy capability; whenever she watched the girl's high-handed treatment of Maurice: criticizing him! Telling him he was mean because he was always saying he "couldn't afford things"! Declaring that she wished he would stop his everlasting practicing—and apparently not caring a copper for him! If Edith said, "Oh, Maurice, you are a perfect idiot!" Eleanor would see him grin with pleasure; but when Eleanor put her arms around him and kissed him, he sighed. To Maurice's wife these things were all like oil on fire; but it never occurred to her to try to develop in herself any of the qualities he seemed to find attractive in Edith. Instead, she thought of that June day in the meadow by the river when he said he loved her inefficiency—he loved her timidity, and, oh, how he had loved her love! He had made her promise to be jealous! Eleanor was not a reasoning person—probably no jealous woman is; but she did recognize the fact that what made him love her then, made him impatient with her now. This seemed to her irrational; and so, of course, it was!—just as the tide is irrational, or the turning of the earth on its axis is irrational. Nature has nothing to do with reason. So, in its deep and beautiful and animal beginnings, Love, too, is irrational. It has to ascend to Reason! But Eleanor did not know these things. All she knew was that Maurice hurt her, a dozen times a day.

She was brooding over this one Sunday afternoon in late September, when, at the open window of her bedroom, with Bingo snoozing in her lap, she listened to Edith, down in the garden: "How about a jug of dahlias on the table?"

And Maurice: "Bully! Say, Edith, why couldn't we have a yellow scheme for the grub? Orange cup, and that sort of fussy business you make out of cheese and the yolks of eggs? And yellow cakes?"

"Splendid! I'll mix up some perfectly stunning little sponge cakes, 'Lemon Queens.' Yellow as anything!"

This was all to get ready for a tea under the silver poplar, which was dropping yellow leaves down on the green table, and the mossy brick path, and the chairs for the company. The Mortons were coming, and there would be, Eleanor told herself, wearily, the usual shrieking over flat jokes,—Edith's jokes, mostly. Her dislike of Edith was a burning ache below her breastbone. "Maurice has her, so he doesn't want me," she thought; then suddenly she got up and hurried downstairs. "I'll fix the table!" she said, peremptorily.

"It's all done," Edith said; "doesn't it look pretty? Oh, Eleanor, let me put a dahlia behind your ear! You'll look like a Spanish lady!" She put the gorgeous flower into the soft disorder of Eleanor's dark hair, avoiding Bingo's angry objections, and said, with open admiration, "Eleanor, you are handsome! I adore dahlias!" she announced; "those quilly ones, red on the outside and yellow inside! There are some stunning ones on Maple Street, where I saw that Dale woman. Wonder if she'd sell some roots?"

The color flew into Maurice's face. "Did you get your bicycle mended?" he said.

Instantly Edith forgot the dahlias, and plunged into bicycle technicalities, ending with the query, "Why don't you squeeze out some money, and buy one of those cheap little automobiles, Maurice, you mean old thing!"

"Can't afford it," Maurice said.

But Eleanor was puzzled. There had been a hurried note in Maurice's voice when he asked Edith about her bicycle—an imperative changing of the subject! She looked at him wonderingly. Why should he change the subject? Was he annoyed at Edith's bad taste in referring to the creature? But Edith's taste was always bad, and Maurice was not generally so sensitive to it; not as sensitive as he ought to be! Or as he had been in those old days when he had said that Eleanor was too lovely to know the wickedness of the world, and he "didn't want her to"! She was really perplexed; and when Edith rushed off to make the cakes, and Maurice went indoors, she sat there in the garden, looking absently out through the rusty bars of the iron gate at the distant glimmer of the river, and wondered: "Why?"

She was still wondering even when the Mortons arrived, bringing with them—of all people!—Doctor Nelson. ("Gosh!" said Maurice.) "We're celebrating his appointment at the hospital; he's the new superintendent!" Mrs. Morton explained.

Eleanor said, mechanically, "So glad to see you, Doctor Nelson!" But she was saying to herself, "Why was Maurice provoked when Edith spoke of Mrs. Dale?" When some more noisy and very young people arrived, she was too abstracted to talk to them. She was so silent that most of them forgot her; until Mrs. Morton, suddenly remembering her existence, tried to be conversational:

"I suppose Mr. Curtis told you of our wild adventure on the river in August, when we got beached and spent the afternoon on a mud flat?"

"No," Eleanor said, vaguely. But afterward, when the guests had gone, she said to Maurice, "Why didn't you tell me about your adventure with the Mortons?"

"He told me," Edith said, complacently.

"I forgot, I suppose," Maurice said, carelessly, and lounged off into the house to sit down at the piano—where lie immediately "forgot" not only the adventure on the river—but even his dismay at seeing Doctor Nelson!—who by this time was, of course, quite certain that it was a "rum world."

That winter—although he was not conscious of it—Maurice's "forgetfulness" in regard to his wife became more and more marked, so it was a year of darkening loneliness for Eleanor. She was at last on that "desert island"—which had once seemed so desirable to her;—she had nothing to interest her except her music (and the quality of her voice was changing, pathetically); furthermore, Maurice rarely asked her to sing, so the passion had gone out of what voice she had! She didn't care for books; she didn't know how to sew; and, except for Mrs. Newbolt, there was no one she wanted to see. Often, in her empty evenings, while Edith was in her own room studying, she sat by the fire and cried, and broke her heart upon her desire for a child—"then he would be happy, and stay at home!"

It was a dull house; so dull that Edith made up her mind to get out of it for her next winter at Fern Hill. When she went home for the Easter vacation, she expressed decided opinions: "Father, once, ages ago"—she was sitting on her father's knee, and tormenting him by trying to take his cigar away from him—"you got off something about the dinner of herbs and Eleanor's stalled ox—"

"Good heavens, Buster! You haven't said that before Eleanor?"

"Ha! I got a rise out of you!" Edith said, joyfully; "I haven't mentioned it, yet; but I shall make a point of doing so unless you order two pounds of candy for me, at once. Well, I suppose what you meant was that Eleanor is stupid?"

"Mary," said Henry Houghton, "your blackmailing daughter is displaying a glimmer of intelligence."

"I'm only reminding you of your own remark," Edith said, "to explain why I want to be in one of the dormitories next winter. Eleanor is stupid—though she's never fed me on stalled ox! And I think she sort of doesn't like it because I'm not awfully fond of music."

"You are an absolute heathen about music," her father said.

"Well, it bores me," Edith explained, cheerfully; "though I adore Maurice's playing. Maurice is a lamb, and I adore just being in the house with him! But she's nasty to him sometimes. And when she is, I'd like to choke her!"

"Edith—Edith—" her mother remonstrated. And her father reminded her that she must not lose her temper.

"Let your other parent be a warning to you as to the horrors of an uncontrolled temper," said Henry Houghton; "I have known your mother, in one of her outbursts of fury, so far forget herself as to say, 'Oh, my!'"

Edith grinned, but insisted, "Eleanor is dull as all get out!"

"Consider the stars," Mrs. Houghton encouraged her.

But Mr. Houghton said, "Mary, you've got to do something about this girl's English! ... You miss John Bennett?" he asked Edith (Johnny was taking a special course in an Eastern institute of technology).

"He did well enough to fill in the chinks," Edith said, carelessly; "but it's Maurice's being away that takes the starch out of me. He's everlastingly tearing off on business. And when he's at home—" Edith was suddenly grave—"of course Maurice is always 'the boy stands on the burning deck'; but you can't help seeing that he's fed up on poor old Eleanor! Sometimes I wonder he ever does come home! If I were in his place, when she gets to nagging I'd go right up in the air! I'd say, well,—something. But he keeps his tongue between his teeth."

That evening, when Henry Houghton was alone with his wife, he said what he thought about Maurice: "He is standing on the burning deck of this pathetic marriage of his, magnificently. He never bats an eyelash! (Your daughter's slang is vulgar.)"

"Eleanor is the pathetic one," Mary Houghton said, sadly; "Maurice has grown cynical—which is a sort of protection to him, I suppose. Yes; I'm afraid Edith is right; she'd better be out at the school next winter. It isn't well for a girl to see differences between a husband and wife.... Henry, you shan't have another cigar! That's the third since supper! Dear, what is the trouble about Maurice?"

"Mary, things have come to a pretty pass, when you snoop around and count up my cigars! I will smoke!" But he withdrew an empty hand from his cigar box, and said, sighing, "I wish I could tell you about Maurice; Kit; but I can't betray his confidence."

"If I guessed, you wouldn't betray anything?"

"Well, no. But—"

"I guessed it a good while ago. Some foolishness about a woman, of course. Or—or badness?" she ended, sadly.

He nodded. "I wish I was asleep whenever I think of it! Mary, there are some pretty steep grades on Fool Hill, and he's had hard climbing.... It's ancient history now; but I can't go into it."

"Of course not. Oh, my poor Maurice! Does Eleanor know?"

"Heavens, no! It wouldn't do."

"Honey, the unforgivable thing, to a woman, is not the sin, but the deceit. And, besides, Eleanor loves him enough to forgive him. She would die for him, I really believe!"

"Yet the green-eyed monster looks out of her eyes if he plays checkers with Edith! My darling," said Henry Houghton, "as I have before remarked, your ignorance on this one subject is colossal. Women can't stand truth."

"It's a provision of nature, then, that all men are liars?" she inquired, sweetly; "Henry, the loss of Edith's board won't trouble Maurice much, will it?"

"Not as much, of course, now that he has all his money; but he has to scratch gravel to make four ends meet," Henry Houghton said.

"Four ends!" she said; "oh, is it as bad as that? He has to support—somebody?"

He said, "Yes; so long as you have guessed. Mary, I really must have a smoke."

"Why am I so weak-minded as to give in to you!" she sighed; then handed him the cigar box, and scratched a match for him; he held her wrist—the sputtering match in her fingers—lighted the cigar, blew out the match, and kissed her hand.

"You are a snooper and a porcupine about tobacco; but otherwise quite a nice woman," he said.



CHAPTER XX

When Edith's Easter vacation was over, and she went back to Mercer, she was followed by a letter from Mrs. Houghton to Eleanor, explaining the plan for the school dormitory the following winter. But there was another letter, to Maurice, addressed (discreetly) to his office. It was from Henry Houghton, and it was to the effect that if any "unexpected expenses" came along, and Maurice felt strapped because of the cessation of Edith's board, he must let Mr. Houghton know; then a suggestion as to realizing on certain securities.

"That's considerate in him," Eleanor said; "but I don't know what 'unexpected expenses' we could have?"

It was a chilly April day. Maurice happened to be laid up home with a sore throat; Eleanor, searching for a cook, had stopped at his office for a lease he wanted to see, and brought back with her some mail she found on his desk.

"I knew this letter was from Mr. Houghton, so I opened it," she said, as she handed it to him. His instant and very sharp annoyance surprised her. "I wouldn't open your business letters," she defended herself; "but I didn't suppose you'd mind my seeing anything the Houghtons might write—"

"I don't like to have any of my mail opened!" he said, briefly, his eyes raking Henry Houghton's letter, and discovering (of course!) nothing in the fine, precise handwriting which was in the least betraying. ("But suppose he had said what the 'unexpected expenses' might be!")

"We shall miss Edith's board," Eleanor said; "but, oh, I'll be so glad to have her go!"

Maurice was silent. "If she lives in Medfield all the time, she'll be sure and run into Lily," he thought. "The devil's in it." He was in his bedroom, wrapped up in a blanket, shivering and hot and headachy. The chance of Edith's "running into Lily" would, of course, be even less if she were at Fern Hill, than it was now when she was going back and forth in the trolley every day; but he was so uncomfortable, physically, that he didn't think of that; and his preoccupation made him blind to Eleanor's hurt look.

"I am willing to have you read all my letters," she said.

"I'm not willing to have you read mine!" he retorted.

"Why not?" she demanded—"unless you have secrets from me."

"Oh, Eleanor, don't be an idiot!" he said, wearily.

"I believe you have secrets!" she said—and burst out crying and ran out of the room.

He called her back and apologized for his irritability; but as he got better, he forgot that he had been irritable—he had something else to think of! He must get down to the office and write to Mr. Houghton, asking him to address personal letters to a post-office box. And he made things still safer by going out to Medfield to see Lily and give her the number of the box in case she, too, had occasion to write any "personal" letters, which, indeed, she very rarely had. "I say that for her!" Maurice told himself. He hoped—as he always did when he had to go to Maple Street, that he would not see It—an It which had, of course, long before this, acquired sufficient personality to its father to be referred to as "Jacky"; a Jacky who, in his turn, had discovered sufficient personality in Maurice to call him "Mr. Gem'man"—a corruption of his mother's title for her very infrequent visitor, "the gentleman."

Jacky's "Mr. Gem'man" found the front door of the little house open, and, looking in, saw Lily in the parlor, mounted on a ladder, hanging wall paper. She stepped down, laughing, and moved her bucket of paste out of his way.

"Won't you be seated?" she said. Her rosy face was beaming with artistic satisfaction; "Ain't this paper lovely?" she demanded; "it's one of them children's papers that's all the rage now. I call it a reg'lar art gallery! Look at the pants on them rabbits! It pretty near broke me to buy it. The swells put this kind of paper in 'nurseries,' and stick their kids off in 'em; but that ain't me! I put it on the parlor! Set down, won't you?"

Maurice sat down and, very much bored, listened while Lily chattered on, with stories about Jacky:

"He says to the milkman yesterday, 'I like your shirt,' he says. And Amos—that's his name—he said, 'You can get one like it when you're grown up like me.' And Jacky, he says—oh, just as sad!—I'd rather have it now, 'cause when I grow up, maybe I'll be a lady.'"

Maurice smiled perfunctorily.

"Ain't he the limit?" Lily demanded, proudly; "he's a reg'lar rascal! He stuck out his tongue at the grocer's boy, yesterday, 'cause he stepped on my pansy bed. I wish you could 'a' seen him."

Maurice swallowed a yawn. "He's fresh."

"'Course," Lily said, quickly, "I gave him a smack! He's getting a good bringing up, Mr. Curtis. I give him a cent every morning, to say his prayers."

Maurice didn't care a copper about Jacky's manners, or his morals, either; but he said, carelessly, "A kid that's fresh is a bore."

Lily frowned. When Maurice, having explained about the letter box, gave her the usual "present" she made her usual good-natured protest—but this time there was more earnestness in it, and even a little sharpness. "I don't need it; I've got three more mealers—well, one of 'em can't pay me; her husband's out of work; but she don't eat more than a canary, poor thing! I can take care of Jacky myself."

The emphasis puzzled Jacky's father for a moment. That Lily, seeing the growing perfection of her handsome, naughty little boy, was becoming uneasy lest Maurice might be moved to envy, never occurred to him. If it had, he would of course have been enormously relieved; he might even have played upon her fear of such an impossibility to induce her to move away from Mercer! As it was, after listening to the account of the pansy catastrophe, he got up to go, thankful that he had not had to lay eyes on the child, whose voice he heard from the back yard.

Lily, friendly enough in spite of that moment of resentment, went to the front door with him. She had grown rather stout in the last year or two, but she was always as shiningly clean as a rose, and her little lodging house was clean, too; she was indefatigably thorough—scrubbing and sweeping and dusting from morning to night! "It's good business," said little Lily; "and it is just honest, too, for they pay me good!" Her only unbusinesslike quality was a generous kindliness, which sometimes considered the "mealers'" purses rather than her own. She had, to be sure, small outbursts of temper, when she "smacked" Jacky, or berated her lodgers for wasting gas; but Jacky was smothered with kisses even before his howls ceased, and the lodgers were placated with cookies the very next day—but that, too, was "good business"! Her "respectability" had become a deep satisfaction to her. She occasionally referred to herself as "a perfect lady." Her feeling about "imperfect" ladies was of most virulent disapproval. But she had no more spirituality than a hen. Her face was as good-humored, and common, and pretty as ever; and she had a fund of not too refined, but always funny, stories to tell Maurice; so he liked her, after a fashion, and she liked him, after a fashion, too, although she was a little afraid of him; his bored preoccupation seemed like sternness to Lily. "Grouchiness," she called it; "probably that's why he don't take to Jacky," she thought; "well, it's lucky he don't, for he shouldn't have him!" But as Maurice, on the little porch, said good-by, she really wondered at his queerness in not taking to Jacky, who, grimy and handsome, was sitting on the ground, spooning earth into an empty lard pail.

"Come in out o' the dirt, Sweety!" Lily called to him.

Jacky rose reluctantly, then stood looking, open-mouthed, at his mother's visitor.

"Say," he remarked; "I kin swear."

"You don't say so!" said Maurice.

"I kin say 'dam,'" Jacky announced, gravely.

"You are a great linguist! Who instructed you in the noble art of profanity?"

"Huh?" said Jacky, shyly.

"Who taught you?"

"Maw," said Jacky.

Maurice roared; Lily giggled,—"My soul and body! Listen to that child! Jacky, you naughty boy, telling wrong stories. One of these days I'm going to give you a reg'lar spanking." Then she stamped her foot, for Jacky had settled down again in the dust; "Do you hear me? Come right in out of the dirt! That's one on me!" she confessed, laughing: then added, anxiously: "Say, Mr. Curtis, I do smack him when he says bad words; honest, I do! He's getting a good bringing up, though my mealers spoil him something awful. But I'd just shake his prayers out of him, if he forgot 'em."

Maurice, still laughing, said: "Well, don't become too proficient, Jacobus. Good-by," he said again. And as he said it, Eleanor, in a trolley car, glanced out of the window and saw him.

"Why, there's Maurice!" she said; and motioned to the conductor to stop. Hunting for a cook had brought her to this impossible suburb, where Maurice, no doubt, was trying to buy or sell a house. "I'll get out and walk home with him," she thought, eagerly. But the car would not stop until the end of the second block, and when she hurried back Maurice had disappeared. He had either gone off in another direction, or else entered the house; but she could not remember which house!—those gingerbread tenements were all so much alike that it was impossible to be sure on which of the small porches she had seen her husband, and a fat, common-looking woman, and a child playing in the yard. All she could do was to wander up and down the block, looking at every front door in the hope that he would appear; as he didn't, she finally took the next car into town.

"Did you sell the house this afternoon?" she asked Maurice at dinner that night; and he, remembering how part of his afternoon had been spent, said he hadn't any particular house on the string at the moment.

"Then what took you to Medfield?" Eleanor asked, simply.

"Medfield!"

"I saw you out there this afternoon," she said; "you were talking to a woman. I supposed she was a tenant. I got off the car to walk home with you, but I wasn't sure of the house; they were all alike."

"What were you doing in Medfield?"

"Oh, Hannah has given notice; I was hunting for a cook. I heard of one out on Bell Street."

"Did you find her?"

"No," Eleanor said, sighing, "it's perfectly awful!"

"Too bad!" her husband sympathized.

In the parlor, after dinner, while Eleanor was getting out the cards for solitaire, Maurice, tingling with alarm and irritation, sat down at the piano and banged out all sorts of chords and discords. "Lily'll have to move," he was saying to himself. (Bang—Bang!) His Imagination raced with the possibilities of what would have happened if Eleanor had found the house which was "like all the other houses," and heard his "good-by" to Lily, or perhaps even caught the latest addition to Jacky's vocabulary! "The jig would have been up," he thought. (Bang—Crash!)... "She'll have to move! Suppose Eleanor took it into her head to hunt her up? She's capable of it!" (Crash!)

Eleanor's absorption in the cook she could not find kept her for nearly forty-eight hours from speculation as to what, if not office business, took Maurice to Medfield. When she did begin to speculate she said to herself, "He doesn't tell me things about his business!" Then she was stabbed again by his annoyance because she had opened the letter from Mr. Houghton; then by his secretiveness in regard to that adventure on the river with Mrs. Morton. (He had told Edith!) Then this—then that—and by and by a tiny heap of nothings, that implied reserves. He wasn't confidential. She told him everything! She never kept a thing from him! And he didn't even tell her why he was over in Medfield when no real-estate matters took him there. Why should he not tell her? And when she said that, the inevitable answer came: He didn't tell her, because he didn't want her to know! Perhaps he had friends there? No. No friends of Maurice's could live in such a locality. Well, perhaps there was some woman? Even as she said this, she was ashamed. She knew she didn't believe it. Of course there wasn't any woman!... But, at any rate, he had interests in Medfield that he did not tell her about. She hinted this to him at breakfast the next morning. She had not meant to speak of it; she knew she would be sorry if she did. Eleanor was incapable of analysis, but she was, in her pitiful way, aware that jealousy, when articulate, is almost always vulgar—perhaps because the decorums of breeding (which insist that, for the sake of others, one's own pain must be hidden) are not propped up by the reserves of pride. At any rate, she was not often publicly bitter to Maurice. This time, however, she was.

"Apparently," she said, "Maurice has acquaintances on Maple Street whom I don't know."

"The elite," Edith remarked, facetiously; "his lovely Mrs. Dale lives there."

Maurice's start was perceptible.

"Perhaps it was Mrs. Dale you went to see?" Eleanor said.

Maurice, trained in these years of furtiveness to self-control, said, "Does she live on Maple Street, Edith?"

"I guess so. The time I rescued her little boy and her flower pot, ages ago, she was going into a house on Maple Street."

"I saw Maurice in Medfield on Thursday," said Eleanor; "and he doesn't seem to want to say what he was doing there!"

"I am perfectly willing to tell you what I was doing," he retorted; "I went from our office to see the woman who rents the house."

Eleanor's slow mind accepted this entirely true and successfully false remark with only the wonder of wounded love. "Why didn't he say that at first?" she thought; "why does he hide things from me?"

Maurice, however, made sure of that "hiding." Eleanor's attack upon him frightened him so badly that that very afternoon, after office hours (Eleanor being safe in bed with a headache), he went to see Lily. Her astonishment at another visit so soon was obvious; she was still further astonished when he told her why he had come. He hated to tell her. To speak of Eleanor offended his taste—but it had to be done. So, stammering, he began—but broke off:

"Send that child away!"

"Run out in the yard, Sweety," Lily commanded.

"Won't," said Jacky.

"Clear out!" Maurice said, sharply, and Jacky obeyed like a shot—but paused on the porch to turn the ferociously clanging doorbell round and round and round. "Well," Maurice began, "I'll tell you what's happened... Lily! Make him stop!"

"Say, now, Jacky, stop," Lily called; but Jacky, seized apparently with a new idea, had already stopped, and was running out on to the pavement.

So again Maurice began his story. Lily's instant and sympathetic understanding was very reassuring. He even caught himself, under the comfort of her quick co-operation, ranging himself with her, and saying "we." "We've got to guard against anything happening, you know."

"Oh, my soul and body, yes!" Lily agreed; "it would be too bad, and no sense, either; you and me just acquaintances. 'Course I'll move, Mr. Curtis. But, there! I hate to leave my garden—and I've just papered this room! And I don't know where to go, either," she ended, with a worried look.

"How would you like to go to New York?" he said, eagerly.

She shook her head: "I've got a lot of friends in this neighborhood. But there's a two-family house on Ash Street—"

"Say," said Jacky, in the hall; "I got—"

"Oh, but you must leave Medfield!" he protested; "she"—that "she" made him wince—"she may try to hunt you up."

"She can't. She don't know my name."

Maurice felt as if privacy were being pulled away from his soul, as skin might be flayed from living flesh. "But you see," he began, huskily, "there's a—a girl who lives with us; and she—she mentioned your name." Then, cringing, he told her about Edith.

Lily looked blankly puzzled; then she remembered; "Why, yes, sure enough! It was right at the gate—oh, as much as four years ago; I slipped, and she grabbed Jacky. Yes; it comes back to me; she told me she seen me the time we got ducked. 'Course, I gave her the glassy eye, and said I didn't remember the gentleman in the boat with her. And she caught on that I lived here? Well, now, ain't the world small?"

"Damned small," Maurice said, dryly.

"Say," said Jacky, from the doorway, "I got a—"

"Well, she—I mean this young lady—told my—ah, wife that you lived on Maple Street, and—" He was stammering with angry embarrassment; Lily gave a cluck of dismay. "Confound it!" said Maurice; "what'll we do?"

"Now, don't you worry!" Lily said, cheerfully. "If she ever speaks to me again, I'll say, 'Why, you have the advantage of me!'"

Her mincing politeness made him laugh, in spite of his irritation. "I think you'd like it in New York?" he urged.

Lily's amber eyes were full of sympathy—but she was firm: "I wouldn't live in New York for anything!"

"Mr. Gem'man," said Jacky, sidling crabwise into the room to the shelter of his mother's skirt; "I—"

"Say, now, Sweety, be quiet! No, Mr. Curtis; I only go into real good society, and I've always heard that New York ladies ain't what they should be. And, besides, I want a garden for Jacky. I'll tell you what I'll do! I'll take the top flat in that house on Ash Street. It has three little rooms I could let. There's a widow lady's been asking me to go in on it with her; it has a garden back of it Jacky could play in—last summer there was a reg'lar hedge of golden glow inside the fence! Mr. Curtis, you'd 'a' laughed! He pinched an orange off a hand-cart yesterday, just as cute! 'Course I gave him a good slap, and paid the man; but I had to laugh, he was so smart. And he's got going now, on God—since I've been paying him to say his prayers. Well, I suppose I'll have to be going to church one of these days," she said, resignedly. "The questions he asks about God are something fierce! I don't know how to answer 'em. Crazy to know what God eats—I told him bad boys."

"Lily, I don't think—Thunder and guns!" said Maurice, leaping to his feet and rubbing his ankle; "Lily, call him off! The little wretch put his teeth into me!"

Lily, horrified, slapped her son, who explained, bawling, "Well, b-b-but he didn't let on he heard me tellin' him that I—"

"I felt you," Maurice said, laughing; "Gosh, Lily! He's cut his eyeteeth—I'll say that for him!" He poked Jacky with the toe of his boot, good-naturedly: "Don't howl, Jacobus. Sorry I hurt your feelings. Lily, what I was going to say was, I don't believe that Ash Street place is what you want?"

"Yes, it is. The widow lady is a dressmaker, and she has three children. We were talking about it only yesterday. Her father's feeble-minded, poor old man! I take him in some doughnuts whenever I fry 'em. Mr. Curtis, don't worry; I'll fix it, somehow! And until I get moved, I won't answer the bell here. Look! I'll give you a key, and you can come in without ringing if you want to."

"No—no! I don't want a key! I wouldn't take a key for a million dollars!"

Lily's quick flush showed how innocent her offer had been. "I suppose that doesn't sound very high toned—to offer a gentleman a key? But I'll tell you! I ain't giving any door keys to my house. Jacky ain't ever going to feel funny about his mother," she said, sharply.

It was on the tip of Maurice's tongue to say, "Nor about his father!" but he was silent. It was the first time his mind had articulated his paternity, and the mere word made him dumb with disgust. Lily, however, was her kind little self again, full of promises to "clear out," and reassurances that "she" would never get on to it.

It was then that the grimness of the situation for Maurice lightened for a ridiculous moment. Jacky, breathing very hard, peered from behind his mother, and stretched out to Maurice an extremely dirty, tightly clenched fist. "I got a—a pre-present for you," he explained, panting. Maurice, in a great hurry to get away, paused to put out his hand, in which his son placed, very gently, a slimy, half-smoked cigar. "Found it," Jacky said, in a stertorous whisper, "in the gutter."

It was impossible not to laugh, and Maurice swallowed his impatience long enough to say, "Jacobus, you overwhelm me!" Then he took his departure, holding the gift between a reluctant thumb and finger. "Funny little beggar," he said to himself, and pitched the stub into the gutter from which Jacky had salvaged it; he didn't look back to see his son hanging over the palings, watching the fate of his present with stricken eyes... So it was that, when the day came that Eleanor did actually begin to search for what was hidden, Maple Street was empty of possibilities; Lily had flitted away into the secrecy of the two-family house on Ash Street.

It was nearly three months before the search began. Edith had gone home, Mrs. Newbolt was at the sea-shore, and Maurice was in and out—away for two or three days at a time on office business, and when at home absent almost every evening with some of those youthful acquaintances who seemed ignorant of Eleanor's existence. So there were long hours when, except for her little old dog, she was entirely alone—alone, to brood over Maurice's queer look when she had accused him of having an "acquaintance on Maple Street"; and by and by she said, "I'll find out who it is!" Yet she had moments of trying to tear from her mind the idea of any concealment, because the mere suspicion was an insult to Maurice! She had occasional high moments of saying, "I won't think he has secrets from me; I'll trust him." But still, because suspicion is the diversion of an empty mind, she played with it, as one might play with a dagger, careful only not to let it touch the quick of belief. After a while she deluded herself into thinking that, to exonerate Maurice, she must prove the suspicion false! It was only fair to him to do that. So she must find the woman whom she had seen on the porch with him. If she wasn't Mrs. Dale, that would "prove" that everything was all right, and that Maurice's presence there only meant that he was attending to office business; nothing to be jealous about in that! And if the woman was Mrs. Dale? Eleanor's throat contracted so sharply that she gasped. But again and again she put off the search for the exonerating proof—for she was ashamed of herself, "I'll do it to-morrow." ... "I'll do it next week."

It was a scorching, windy July day when she took her first defiling step and "did it." There had been a breakfast-table discussion of a vacation at Green Hill, the usual invitation having been received.

"Do go," Maurice had urged. "I'll do what I did last year—hang around here, and go to the ball games, and come up to Green Hill for Sundays." He was acutely anxious to have her go.

She was silent. "Why does he want to be alone?" she thought; "why—unless he goes over to Medfield?" Then, in sudden decision, she said to herself, "I will find out why, to-day!" But she was afraid that Maurice would, somehow, guess what she was going to do; so, to throw him quite off the track, she told him that Donny O'Brien was sick again; "I must go and see him this morning," she said.

Maurice, reading the sports page of the morning paper, said, "Too bad!" and went on reading. He had no interest in his wife's movements; the two-family house on Ash Street was beyond her range!

An hour later, Eleanor, giving Bingo a cooky to console him for being left at home, started out into the blazing heat, saying to herself: "I'll recognize her the minute I see her. Of course I know she isn't the Dale woman, but I want to prove that she isn't!"

Her plan was to ring the bell at every one of the gingerbread houses on that block on Maple Street, and ask if Mrs. Dale lived there? If she was not to be found, that would prove that Maurice had not gone to see her. If she was found, why, then—well, then Eleanor would say that she had heard that the house was in the market? If Mrs. Dale said it was not, that would show that it wasn't "office business" which had brought Maurice to that porch!

On Maple Street the heat blazed up from the untidy pavement, and a harsh wind was whirling little spirals of dust up and down the dry gutter. Eleanor's heart was beating so smotheringly that when her first ring was answered she could scarcely speak: "Does Mrs. Dale live here?"

"No," said the girl who opened the door, "there ain't nobody by that name livin' here."

And at the next door: "Mrs. Dale? No. This is Mrs. Mahoney's house."

It was at the sixth house, where some dusty pansies were drying up under the little bay window, that a woman whose red, soapy hands had just left the wash tub, said:

"Some folks with that name lived here before I took the house. But they moved away. She was real nice; used to give candy to the children round here. She was a widow lady. She told me her husband's name was Joseph. Was it her you was looking for?"

"I don't know her husband's name," Eleanor said.

"Her baby had measles when mine did," the woman went on; "I lived across the street, then. But I took a fancy to the house, because she'd papered the parlor so handsome, so I moved in the first of May, when she got out."

A little cold, prickling thrill ran down Eleanor's back. She had told herself that "Maurice had a secret"; but she had not really believed that the secret was about Mrs. Dale. She had been sure, in the bottom of her heart, that she would be able to "prove" that the woman he had been talking to that day was not Mrs. Dale.

Now, she had proved—that she was.

Eleanor swayed a little, and put her hand out to clutch at the porch railing. The woman exclaimed:

"Come in and sit down! I'll get you a glass of water."

Eleanor followed her into the kitchen and sat down on a wooden chair. She was silent, but she whitened slowly. The mistress of the house, scared at her pallor, ran to draw a tumbler of water from the faucet in the sink; she held it to Eleanor's lips, apologizing for her wet hands:

"I was tryin' to get my wash out.... Where do you feel bad?"

"It's so hot, that's all," Eleanor said, faintly: "I—I'm not ill—thank you very much." She tried to smile, but the ruthless glare of sunshine through the open kitchen door showed her face strained, as if in physical suffering.

"I'm awfully sorry I can't tell you where Mrs. Dale lives," the woman said, sympathetically. "Was she a friend of yours?" Eleanor shook her head. "There! I'll tell you who maybe could tell you—the doctor. He took care of her baby. Doctor Nelson—"

"Nelson!"

"He's the hospital doctor now. Why don't you ask him?"

"Thank you," said Eleanor vaguely. She rose, saying she felt better and was much obliged. Then she went out on to the porch, and down the broken steps to the windy scorching street.

She was certain: Maurice had gone to Medfield to see Mrs. Dale...

Why?

She was quite calm, so calm that she found herself thinking that she had forgotten to get an yeast cake for Mary. "I'll get it as I go home," she thought. But as she stood waiting for the car it occurred to her that she had better think things out before she went home. Better not see Maurice until she had decided just how she should tell him that there was no use having secrets from her! That she knew he was seeing Mrs. Dale! Then he would have to tell her why he was seeing her... There could be only one reason... For a moment she was suffocated by that "reason"! She let the returning car pass, and signaled the one going out into the country; she would go, she told herself, to the end of the route, and by that time she would know what to do. The car was crowded, but a kindly faced young woman rose and offered her a seat. Eleanor declined it, although her knees were trembling.

"Oh, do take it!" the woman urged, pleasantly, and Eleanor could not resist sinking into it.

"You are very kind," she said, smiling faintly.

The woman smiled, too, and said, "Well, I always think what I'd like anyone to do for my mother, if she couldn't get a seat in a car! I guess you're about her age."

Eleanor hardly heard her; she sat staring out of the window—staring at that same landscape on which she and Maurice had gazed in the unseeing ecstasy of their fifty-four minutes of married life! "He said we would come back in fifty years—not by ourselves." As she said that, a thought stabbed her! There was a child that day, in the yard!

When she saw that the car was approaching the end of the route, she thought of the locust tree, and the blossoming grass, and the whispering river. "I'll go there, and think," she said.

"All out!" said the conductor; and she rose and walked, stumbling once or twice, and with one hand outstretched, as if—in the dazzling July day—she had to feel her way in an enveloping darkness. She went down the country road, where the bordering weeds were white with dust, toward that field of young love, and clover, and blue sky.

When she reached the river, curving around the meadow, brown and shallow in the midsummer droughts, she saw that the big locust was long past blossoming, but some elderberry bushes, in full bloom, made the air heavy with acrid perfume; the grass, starred by daisies, and with here and there a clump of black-eyed Susans, was ready for mowing, and was tugging at its anchoring roots, blowing, and bending, and rippling in the wind, just as it had that other day!... "And I sat right here, by the tree," she said, "and he lay there—I remember the exact place. And he took my hand—"

Her mind whirled like a merry-go-round: "Well, I knew he was hiding something. I wish I had seen Doctor Nelson, and asked him where she lives. I wonder if he's the Mortons' friend?... If I don't get that yeast cake to Mary before lunch, she can't set the rolls.... Edith saw her with a child five years ago. Why"—her mind stumbled still farther back—"why, the very day Edith arrived in Mercer, Maurice had been looking at some house in Medfield, where the tenant had a sick child. That was why he was late in meeting Mrs. Houghton!... The child had measles. I wish I had gone to see Doctor Nelson! Then I would have known.... I can get some rolls at the bakery, and Mary needn't set them for dinner. I sang 'O Spring.'" She put her hands over her face, but there were no tears. "He kissed the earth, he was so happy. When did he stop being happy? What made him stop?... I wonder if there are any snakes here?—Oh, I must think what to do!" Again her mind flew off at so violent a tangent that she felt dizzy. "I didn't tell Mary what to have for dinner.... He gave her his coat, that time when the boat upset.... She was all painted, he said so." She picked three strands of grass and began to braid them together: "He did that; he made the ring, and put it over my wedding ring." Mechanically she opened her pocketbook, and took out the little envelope, shabby now, with years of being carried there. She lifted the flap, and looked at the crumbling circle. Then she put it back again, carefully, and went on with her toilsome thinking: "I'll tell him I know that he went to see the Dale woman. ... He said we had been married fifty-four minutes. It's eight years and one month. He thinks I'm old. Well, I am. That woman in the car thought I was her mother's age, and she must have been thirty! Why did he stop loving me? He hates Mary's cooking. He said Edith could make soup out of a paving stone and a blade of grass. Edith is rude to me about music, and he doesn't mind! How vulgar girls are, nowadays. Oh—I hate her!... Mary'll give notice if I say anything about her soup."

Suddenly through this welter of anger and despair a small, confused thought struggled up; it was so unexpected that she actually gasped: He hadn't quite lied to her! "There was office business!" Some real-estate transfer must have been put through, because—"Mrs. Dale had moved"! In her relief, Eleanor burst into violent crying; he had not entirely lied! To be sure, he didn't say that the woman whom he had gone "from the office" to see, the woman who rented the house, was Mrs. Dale; in that, he had not been frank; he kept the name back—but that was only a reserve! Only a harmless secrecy. There was nothing wrong in renting a house to the Dale woman! As Eleanor said this to herself, it was as if cool water flowed over flame-licked flesh. Yes; he didn't talk to her as he did to Edith of business matters; he didn't tell her about real-estate transactions; but that didn't mean that the Dale woman was anything to him! She was crying hard, now; "He just isn't frank, that's all." She could bear that; it was cruel, but she could bear it! And it was a protection to Maurice, too; it saved him from the slur of being suspected. "Oh, I am ashamed to have suspected him!" she thought; "how dreadful in me! But I've proved that I was wrong." When she said that she knew, in a numb way, that after this she must not play with the dagger of an unbelieved suspicion. She recognized that this sort of thing may be a mental diversion—but it is dangerous. If she allowed herself to do it again, she might really be stabbed; she might lose the saving certainty that he had not lied to her—that he had only been "not frank."

Suddenly she remembered how unwilling he had been, years ago, to talk of the creature to her! She smiled faintly at his foolishness. Perhaps he didn't want to talk of her now? Men are so absurd about their wives! Her heart thrilled at such precious absurdity. As for seeing that doctor—of course she wouldn't see him! She didn't need to see him. And, anyhow, she wouldn't, for anything in the world, have him, or anybody else, suppose that she had had even a thought that Maurice wasn't—all right! "He just wasn't quite frank; that was all." ... Oh, she had been wicked to suspect him! "He would never forgive me if he knew I had thought of such a thing, He must never know it."

In the comfort of her own remorse, and the reassurance of his half frankness, she walked back to the station and waited, in the midday heat, for the returning car. Her head had begun to ache, but she said to herself that she must not disappoint little Donny. So she went, in the blazing sun, to the old washerwoman's house, climbed three flights of stairs, and found the boy in bed, flushed with worry for fear "Miss Eleanor" wasn't coming. She took the little feeble body in her arms, and sat down in the steamy kitchen by an open window, where Donny could see, on the clothes lines that stretched like gigantic spiderwebs across a narrow courtyard, shirts and drawers, flapping and kicking and bellying in the high, hot wind. She talked to him, and said that if his grandmother would hire a piano, she would give him music lessons;—and all the while her sore mind was wondering how old the mother of that woman in the car was? Then she sang to Donny—little merry, silly songs that made him smile:

"The King of France, And forty thousand men, Marched up a hill—"

She stopped short; Edith had thrown "The King of France" at her, that day of the picnic, when she had cringed away from the water and the slimy stones, and climbed up on the bank where she had been told to "guard the girl's shoes and stockings"! "Oh, I'll be so glad to get her and her 'brains' out of the house!" Eleanor thought. But her voice, lovely still, though fraying with the years—went on:

"Marched up a hill— And then marched down again!"

When, with a splitting headache, she toiled home through the heat, she said to herself: "He ought to have been frank, and told me the woman was Mrs. Dale; I wouldn't have minded, for I know such a person couldn't have interested him. She had no figure, and she looked stupid. He couldn't have said she had 'brains'! That girl in the car was impertinent."



CHAPTER XXI

The heat and the wind—and remorse—gave Eleanor such a prolonged headache that Maurice, in real anxiety and without consulting her—wrote to Mrs. Houghton that "Nelly was awfully used up by the hot weather," and might he bring her to Green Hill now, instead of later? Her prompt and friendly telegram, "Come at once," made him tell his wife that he was going to pack her off to the mountains, quick!

She began to say no, she couldn't manage it; "I—I can't leave Bingo" (she was hunting for an excuse not to leave Maurice), "Bingo is so miserable if I am out of his sight."

"You can take him,—old Rover's gone to heaven. Think you can start to-morrow?" He sat down beside her and took her hand in his warm young paw; the pity of her made him frown—pity, and an intolerable annoyance at himself! She, a woman twice his age, had married him, when, of course, she ought to have told him not to be a little fool; "...wiped my nose and sent me home!" he thought, with cynical humor. But, all the same, she loved him. And he had played her a damned cheap trick!—which was hidden safely away in the two-family house on Ash Street. "Hidden." What a detestable word! It flashed into Maurice's mind that if, that night among the stars, he had made a clean breast of it all to Eleanor, he wouldn't now be going through this business of hiding things—and covering them up by innumerable, squalid little falsenesses. "There would have been a bust-up, and she might have left me. But that would have been the end of it!" he thought; he would have been free from what he had once compared to a dead hen tied around a dog's neck—the clinging corruption of a lie! The Truth would have made him free. Aloud, he said, "Star,"—she caught her breath at the old lovely word—"I'll go to Green Hill with you, and take care of you for a few days. I'm sure I can fix it up at the office."

The tears leaped to her eyes. "Oh, Maurice!" she said; "I haven't been nice to you. I'm afraid I'm—rather temperamental. I—I get to fancying things. One day last week I—had horrid thoughts about you."

"About me?" he said, laughing; "well, no doubt I deserved 'em!"

"No!" she said, passionately; "no—you didn't! I know you didn't. But I—" With the melody of that old name in her ears, her thoughts were too shameful to be confessed. She wouldn't tell him how she had wronged him in her mind; she would just say: "Don't keep things from me, darling! Be frank with me, Maurice. And—" she stopped and tried to laugh, but her mournful eyes dredged his to find an indorsement of her own certainties—"and tell me you don't love anybody else?"

She held her breath for his answer:

"You bet I don't!"

The humor of such a question almost made him laugh. In his own mind he was saying, "Lily, and Love? Good Lord!"

Eleanor, putting her hand on his, said, in a whisper, "But we have no children. Do you mind—very much?"

"Great Scott! no. Don't worry about that. That's the last thing I think of! Now, when do you think you can start?" He spoke with wearied but determined gentleness.

She did not detect the weariness,—the gentleness made her so happy; he called her "Star"! He said he didn't love anyone else! He said he didn't mind because they had no children.... Oh, how dreadful for her to have had those shameful fears—and out in "their meadow," too! It was sacrilege.... Aloud, she said she could be ready by the first of the week; "And you'll stay with me? Can't you take two weeks?" she entreated.

"Oh, I can't afford that" he said; "but I guess I can manage one...."

Later that day, when she told Mrs. Newbolt—who had come home for a fortnight—what Maurice had planned for her, Eleanor's happiness ebbed a little in the realization that he would be in town all by himself, "for a whole week! He'll go off with the Mortons, I suppose," she said, uneasily.

"Well," said Mrs. Newbolt, with what was, for her, astonishing brevity, "why shouldn't he? Don't forget what my dear father said about cats: 'Open the door!' Tell Maurice you want him to go off with the Mortons!"

Of course Eleanor told him nothing of the sort. But she was obliged, at Green Hill, to watch him "going off" with Edith. "I should think," she said once, "that Mrs. Houghton wouldn't want her to be wandering about with you, alone."

"Perhaps Mrs. Houghton doesn't consider me a desperate character," he said, dryly; "and, besides, Johnny Bennett chaperones us!"

Sometimes not even John's presence satisfied Eleanor, and she chaperoned her husband herself. She did it very openly one day toward the end of Maurice's little vacation. Henry Houghton had said, "Look here; you boys" (of course Johnny was hanging around) "must earn your salt! We've got to get the second mowing in before night. I'll present you both with a pitchfork."

To which Maurice replied, "Bully!"

"Me, too!" said Edith.

And John said, "I'll be glad to be of any assistance, sir."

("How their answers sum those youngsters up!" Mr. Houghton told his Mary.)

Eleanor, dogging Maurice to a deserted spot on the porch, said, uneasily, "Don't do it, darling; it's too hot for you."

But he only laughed, and started off with the other two to work all morning in the splendid heat and dazzle of the field. "Skeezics, don't be so strenuous!" he commanded, once; and Johnny was really nervous:

"It's too hot for you, Buster."

"Too hot for your grandmother!" Edith said—bare-armed, open-throated, her creamy neck reddening with sunburn.

Toward noon, Maurice's chaperon, toiling out across the hot stubble to watch him, called from under an umbrella, "Edith! You'll get freckled."

"When I begin to worry about my complexion, I'll let you know," Edith retorted; "Maurice, your biceps are simply great!"

"How she flatters him!" Eleanor thought; "And she knows he is looking at her." He was! Edith, lifting a forkful of hay, throwing the weight on her right thigh and straining backward with upraised arms, her big hat tumbling over one ear, and the sweat making her hair curl all around her forehead, was something any man would like to look at! No man would want to look at Eleanor—a tired, dull, jealous woman, whose eyes were blinking from the glare and whose face sagged with elderly fatigue. She turned silently and went away. "He likes to be with her—but he doesn't say so. Oh, if he would only be frank!" Her eyes blurred, but she would not let the tears come, so they fell backward into her heart—which brimmed with them, to overflow, after a while, in bitter words.

Edith, watching the retreating figure, never guessing those unshed tears, said, despairingly, to herself, "I suppose I ought to go home with her?" She dropped her pitchfork; "I'll come back after dinner, boys," she said; "I must look after Eleanor now."

"Quitter!" Maurice jeered; but Johnny said, "I'm glad she's gone; it's too much for a girl." His eyes followed her as she went running over the field to catch up with Eleanor, who, on the way back to the house, only poke once; she told Edith that flattery was bad taste the cup overflowed! "Men hate flattery," she said.

"Hate it?" said Edith, "they lap it up!"

When the two young men sat down under an oak for their noon hour, with a bucket of buttermilk standing precariously in the grass beside them, John said again, anxiously, "It was too hot for her; I hope she won't have a headache."

"She always has headaches," Maurice said, carelessly.

"What!" said Bennett, alarmed; "she's never said a word to me about headaches."

"Oh, you mean Edith? I thought you meant Eleanor. Edith never had a headache in her life! Some girl, Johnny?"

"Has that just struck you?" said John.

Maurice fished some grass seeds out of the buttermilk, took a deep draught of it, and looked at his companion, lying full length on the stubble in the shadow of the oak. It came to him with a curious shock that Bennett was in love. No "calf love" this time! Just a young man's love for a young woman—sound and natural, and beautiful, and right.... "I wonder," Maurice thought, "does she know it?"

It seemed as if Johnny, puffing at his pipe, and slapping a mosquito on his lean brown hand, answered his thought:

"Edith's astonishingly young. She doesn't realize that she's grown up." There was a pause; "Or that I have."

Maurice was silent; he suddenly felt old. These two—these children!—believing in love, and in each other, were in a world of their own; a world which knew no hidden household in the purlieus of Mercer; no handsome, menacing, six-year-old child; no faded, jealous woman, overflowing with wearisome caresses! In this springtime world was Edith—vigorous, and sweet, and supremely reasonable;—and never temperamental! And this young man, loving her.... Maurice turned over on his face in the grass; but he did not kiss the earth's "perfumed garment"; he bit his own clenched fist.

He was very silent for the rest of their day in the field for one thing, they had to work at a high pitch, for then were blue-black clouds in the west! At a little after three Edith came out again, but not to help.

"I had to put on my glad rags," she said, sadly, "because some people are coming to tea. I hate 'em—I mean the rags."

Maurice stopped long enough to turn and look at her, and say, "They're mighty pretty!" And so, indeed, they were—a blue organdie, with white ribbons around the waist, and a big white hat with a pink rose in a knot of black velvet on the brim. "How's Eleanor?" he said, beginning to skewer a bale of hay on to his pitchfork.

"She's afraid there's going to be a thunderstorm," Edith said; "that's why I came out here. She wants you, Maurice."

"All right," he said, briefly; and struck his fork down in the earth. "I've got to go, Johnny."

To do one's duty without love is doubtless better than to fail in doing one's duty, but it has its risks. Maurice's heartless "kindness" to his wife was like a desert creeping across fertile earth; the eager generosity of boyhood had long ago hardened into the gray aridity of mere endurance.

Edith turned and walked back with him; they were both silent until Maurice said, "You've got Johnny's scalp all right, Skeezics."

"Don't be silly!" she said; her annoyance made her look so mature that he was apologetic; was she in love with the cub? He was suddenly dismayed, though he could not have said why. "I don't like jokes like that," Edith said.

"I beg your pardon, Edith. I somehow forget you're grown up," he said, and sighed.

She laughed. "Eleanor and you have my age on your minds! Eleanor informed me that I was too old to be rampaging round making hay with you two boys! And she thinks I 'flatter' you," Edith said, grinning. "I trust I'm not injuring your immortal soul, Maurice, and making you vain of your muscle?"

Instantly he was angry. Eleanor, daring to interfere between himself and Edith? He was silent for the rest of the walk home; and he was still silent when he went up to his wife's room and found her lying on her bed, old Bingo snoozing beside her—windows closed, shades down. "Oh, Maurice!" she said, with a gasp of relief; "I was so afraid you would get caught in a thunderstorm!"

"Don't be so absurd!" he said.

"I—I love you; that's why I am 'absurd,'" she said, piteously. It was as if she held to his lips the cup of her heart, brimming with those unshed tears,—but is there any man who would not turn away from a cup that holds so bitter a draught?

Maurice turned away. "This room is insufferably hot!" he said. He let a window curtain roll up with a jerk, and flung open a window.

She was silent.

"I wish," he said, "that you'd let up on Edith. You're always criticizing her. I don't like it."

* * * * *

That night Johnny Bennett, somehow, lured Edith out on to the porch to say good night. The thunderstorm had come and gone, and the drenched garden was heavy with wet fragrance.

"Let's sit down," Johnny said; then, beseechingly, "Edith, don't you feel a little differently about me, now?"

"Oh, Johnny, dear!"

"Just a little, Edith? You don't know what it would mean to me, just to hope?"

"Johnny, I am awfully fond of you, but—"

"Well, never mind," he said, patiently, "I'll wait."

He went down the steps, hesitated, and, while Edith was still squeezing a little wet ball of a handkerchief against her eyes, came back.

"Do you mind if I ask you just one question, Edith?"

"Of course not! Only, Johnny, it just about kills me to be—horrid to you."

"Have you really got to be horrid?" said John Bennett.

"Johnny, I can't help it!"

"Is it because there's any other fellow, Edith? That's the question I wanted to ask you."

She was silent.

"Edith, I really think I have a right to know?"

Still she didn't speak.

"Of course, if there is—"

"There isn't!" she broke in.... "Why, Johnny, you're the best friend I have. No; there isn't anybody else. The honest truth is, I don't believe I'm the sort of girl that gets married. I can't imagine caring for anybody as much as I care for father and mother and Maurice. I—I'm not sentimental, Johnny, a bit. I'm awfully fond of you; awfully! You come next to Maurice. But—but not that way. That's the truth, Johnny. I'm perfectly straight with you; you know that? And you won't throw me over, will you? If I lost you, I declare I—I don't know what I'd do! You won't give me up, will you?"

John Bennett was silent for a long minute; then he said, "No, Edith; I'll never give you up, dear." And he went away into the darkness.



CHAPTER XXII

Edith's flight to one of the schoolhouses was not the entire release that Eleanor expected.

"Look here, Skeezics," Maurice had announced; "you can't turn me down this way! You've got to come to supper every Sunday night!—when I'm at home. Isn't that so, Nelly?"

Eleanor said, bleakly: "Why, if Edith would like to, of course. But I shouldn't think she'd care to come in to town at six, and rush out to Medfield right after supper."

"I don't mind," Edith said.

"You bet she won't rush off right after supper!" Maurice said; "I won't let her. And if she doesn't get in here by three o'clock, I'll know the reason why!"

So Edith came in every Sunday afternoon at three—and Eleanor never left her alone with Maurice for a moment! She sat and watched them; saw Edith's unconcealed affection for Maurice, saw Maurice's pleasure in Edith, saw his entire forgetfulness of herself,—and as she sat, silently, watching, watching, jealousy was like a fire in her breast.

However, in spite of Eleanor, sitting on the other side of the fire, in bitter silence, those Sunday afternoons were delightful to Edith. She and Maurice were more serious with each other now. His feeling about her was that she was a mighty pretty girl, who had sense, and who, as he expressed it, "spoke his language." Her feeling about him was a frankly expressed appreciation which Eleanor called "flattery." She had an eager respect for his opinions, based on admiration for what she called to herself his hard-pan goodness. "How he keeps civil to Eleanor, I don't know!" Edith used to think. Sometimes, watching his civility—his patience, his kindness, and especially his ability to hold his tongue under the provocation of some laconic and foolish criticism from Eleanor—Edith felt the old thrill of the Sir Walter Raleigh moment. Yes; there was no one on earth like Maurice! Then she thought, contritely, of good old Johnny. "If I hadn't known Maurice, I might have liked Johnny," she thought; "he is a lamb." When she reflected upon Eleanor, something in her generous, careless young heart hardened: "She's not nice to Maurice!" She had no sympathy for Eleanor. Youth, having never suffered, is brutally unsympathetic. Edith had known nothing but love,—given and received; so of course she could not sympathize with Eleanor!

When the Sunday-night suppers were over, Eleanor and Maurice escorted their guest back to Fern Hill; Edith always said, "Don't bother to go home with me, Eleanor!" And Maurice always said, "I'll look after the tyke, Nelly, you needn't go"; and Eleanor always said, "Oh, I don't mind." Which was, of course, her way of "locking the door" to keep her cat from a roof that became more alluring with every bolt and bar which shut him from it.

On these trolley rides through Medfield Maurice was apt to be rather silent, and he had a nervous way of looking toward the rear platform whenever the car stopped to take on a passenger—"although," he told himself, "what difference would it make if Lily did get on board? She's so fat now, Edith wouldn't know her. And as for Lily, she's white. She'd play up, like a 'perfect lady'!"

He was quite easy about Lily. He hadn't seen her for more than a year, and she made no demands on him. She was living in the two-family house on Ash Street, with the dressmaker and her three children and feeble-minded father, in the lower flat. There was the desired back yard for Jacky, where a thicket of golden glow lounged against the fence, and where, tinder stretching clothes lines, a tiny garden overflowed with color and perfume. Every day little Lily would leave her own work (which was heavy, for she had several "mealers") and run downstairs to help Mrs. Hayes wash and dress the imbecile old man. And she kept a pot of hyacinths blooming on his window sill.

Maurice (with grinding economies) sent her a quarterly money order, and felt that he was, as he expressed it to himself, "square with the game,"—with the Lily-and-Jacky game. He could never be square with the game he played with Eleanor; and as for his own "game," his steadily pursued secretiveness was a denial of his own standards which permanently crippled his self-respect. Though, curiously enough, these years of careful lying had made him, on every subject except those connected with the household in Medfield, of a most scrupulous truthfulness. Indeed, the office still called him "G. Washington."

Jacky was six that winter—a handsome, spoiled little boy. He looked like Maurice—the same friendly, eager, very bright blue eyes and the same shock of blond hair. Lily's ideas of discipline were, of course, ruining him, to which fact Maurice was entirely indifferent; his feeling about Jacky was nothing but a sort of spiritual nausea; Jacky was not only an economic nuisance, but he had made him a liar! He said to himself that of course he didn't want anything to happen to the brat ("that would break Lily's heart!"), but—

Then in March, something did happen to him. It was on a Sunday that the child came down with scarlet fever, and Lily, in her terror, did the one thing that she had never done, and that Maurice, in his certainty of her "whiteness," felt sure she never would or could do: she sent a telegram—to his house!

It had been a cold, sunny day. Just before luncheon Eleanor had been summoned to Mrs. O'Brien's: "Donny is kind of pining; do please come and sing to him, Miss Eleanor," the worried grandmother wrote, and Eleanor hadn't the heart to refuse. "I suppose," she thought, looking at Maurice and Edith, "they'll be glad to get rid of me!" They were squabbling happily as to whether altruism was not merely a form of selfishness; Edith had flung, "Idiot!" at Maurice; and Maurice had retorted, "I never expect a woman to reason!" It was the kind of squabbling which is the hall mark of friendship and humor, and it would have been impossible between Eleanor and her husband.... She left them, burning with impatience to get down to Mrs. O'Brien's and back again in the shortest possible time. As soon as she was out of the house Maurice disposed of altruism by a brief laying down of the law:

"There's no such thing as disinterestedness. You never do anything for anybody, except for what you get out of it for yourself.... Let's go skating?"

The suggestion was not the result of premeditation; Maurice, politely opening the front door for his wife, had realized, as he stood on the threshold and a biting wind flung a handful of powdery snow in his face,—the sparkling coldness of the day; and he thought to himself, "this is about the last chance for skating! There'll be a thaw next week." So, when he came back, whistling, to the library, he said: "Are you game for skating? It's cold as blazes!"