And Edith said: "You bet I am! Only we'll have to go to Fern Hill for my skates!"

Maurice said, "All right!" and off they went, the glowing vigor and youth of them a beauty in itself!

So it was that when Eleanor got home, after having gently and patiently sung to poor Donny for nearly an hour, the library was empty; but a note on the mantelpiece said: "We've gone skating.—E. and M." "She waited until I went out," Eleanor thought; "then she suggested it to him!" She sat down, huddling over the fire, and thinking how Maurice neglected her; "He doesn't want me. He likes to go off with Edith, alone!" They had probably gone to the river—"our river!"—that broad part just below the meadow, where there was apt to be good skating. That made her remember the September day and the picnic, when Edith had talked about jealousy—"Bingoism," she had called it. "She tried to attract him by being smart. I detest smartness!" The burning pain under her breastbone was intolerable. She thought of the impertinent things Edith had said that day—and the ridiculous inference that if the person of whom you were jealous, was more attractive in any way than you were yourself, it was unreasonable to be jealous;—"get busy, and be attractive!" Edith had said, with pert shallowness. "She doesn't know what she's talking about!" Eleanor said; and jealousy seared her mind as a flame might have seared her flesh. "I haven't skated since I was a girl.... I—I believe next winter I'll take it up again." The tears stood in her eyes.

It was at that moment that the telegram was brought into the library.

"Mr. Curtis isn't in," Eleanor told the maid; then she did what anyone would do, in the absence of the person to whom the dispatch was addressed; signed for it ... opened it ... read it.

_Jacky's sick; please come over quick.

L. D_.

"There's no answer," she said. When the maid had left the room, Maurice's wife moistened the flap of the flimsy brown envelope—it had been caught only on one side; got up, went into the hall, laid the dispatch on the table, came back to the library, and fainted dead away.

No one heard her fall, so no one came to help her—except her little dog, scrabbling stiffly out of his basket, and coming to crouch, whining, against her shoulder. It was only a minute before her eyelids flickered open;—closed—opened again. After a while she tried to rise, clutching with one hand at the rung of a chair, and with the other trying to prop herself up; but her head swam, and she sank back. She lay still for a minute; then realized that if Maurice came in and found her there on the floor, he would know that she had read the telegram.... So again she tried to pull herself up; caught at the edge of his desk, turned sick, saw everything black; tried again; then, slowly, the room whirling about her, got into a chair and lay back, crumpled up, blindly dizzy, and conscious of only one thing: she must get upstairs to her own room before Edith and Maurice came home! She didn't know why she wanted to do this; she was even a little surprised at herself, as she had been surprised when, that night on the mountain, "to save Maurice," she had, instinctively, done one sensible thing after another. So now she knew that, when he came home with Edith, Maurice must be saved "a scene." He must not discover, yet, that ... she knew.

For of course now, it was knowledge, not suspicion: Maurice was summoned to see a sick boy called Jacky; Jacky was the child of L. D.; and L. D. was the Dale woman, who had lived in the house on Maple Street. Her shameful suspicion had not been shameful! It had been the recognition of a fact.... Clutching at supporting chairs, Eleanor, somehow, got out of the library; saw that brown envelope in the hall, stopped (holding with one hand to the table), to make sure it was sealed. Bingo, following her, whimpered to be lifted and carried upstairs, but she didn't notice him. She just clung to the banisters and toiled up to her room. She pushed open her door and looked at her bed, desiring it so passionately that it seemed to her she couldn't live to reach it—to fall into it, as one might fall into the grave, enamored with death. Down in the hall the little dog cried. She didn't faint again. She just lay there, without feeling, or suffering. After a while she heard the front door open and close; heard Edith's voice: "Hullo, Eleanor! Where are you? We've had a bully time!" Heard Maurice: "Headache, Nelly? Too ba—" Then silence; he must have seen the envelope—picked it up—read it.... That was why he didn't finish that word—so hideously exact!—"bad." After a while he came tiptoeing into the room.

"Headache? Sorry. Anything I can do?"

"No."

He did not urge; he was too engrossed in the shock of an escaped catastrophe; suppose Eleanor had read that dispatch! Good God! Was Lily mad? He must go and see her, quick, and say—He grew so angry as he thought of what he was going to say that he did not hear Edith's friendly comments on "poor dear Eleanor."

"Edith," he said, "that—that dispatch: I've got to see somebody on business. Awfully sorry to take you out to Fern Hill before supper, but I'm afraid I've got to rush off—"

"'Course! But don't bother to take me home. I can go by myself."

"No. It's all right. I have time; but I've got to go right off. I hate to drag you away before supper—"

"That's of no consequence!" she said, but she gave Maurice a swift look. What was the matter with him? His forehead, under that thatch of light hair, was so lined, and his lips were set in such a harsh line, that he looked actually old! Edith sobered into real anxiety. "I wish," she said, "that you wouldn't go out to Fern Hill; you'll have to come all the way back to town for your appointment!"

He said, "No: the—the appointment is on that side of the river." On the trolley there was no more conversation than there might have been if Eleanor had been present. At Edith's door he said, "'Night—"

But as he turned away, she called to him, "Maurice!" Then ran down the steps and put her hand on his arm: "Maurice, look here; is there anything I can do? You're bothered!"

He gave a grunt of laughter. "To be exact, Edith, I'm damned bothered. I've been several kinds of a fool."

"You haven't! And it wouldn't make any difference if you had. Maurice, you're a perfect lamb! I won't have you call yourself names! Why"—her eyes were passionate with tenderness, but she laughed—"I used to call you 'Sir Walter Raleigh,' you know, because you're great, simply great! Maurice, I bet on you every time! Do tell me what's the matter? Maybe I can help. Father says I have lots of sense."

Maurice shook his head. "You do have sense! I wish I had half as much. No, Skeezics; there's nothing anybody can do. I pay as I go. But you're the dearest girl on earth!"

She caught at his hand, flung her arm around his shoulder, and kissed him: "You are the dearest boy on earth!" Before he could get his breath to reply, she flew into the house—flew upstairs—flew into her own room, and banged the door shut. "Maurice is unhappy!" she said. The tears started, and she stamped her foot. "I can't bear it! Old darling Maurice—what makes him unhappy? I could kill anybody that hurts Maurice!" She began to take off her hat, her fingers trembling—then stopped and frowned: "I believe Eleanor's been nasty to him? I'd like to choke her!" Suddenly her cheeks burned; she stood still, and caught her lower lip between her teeth; "I don't care! I'm glad I did it. I—I'd do it again! ... Darling old Maurice!"



CHAPTER XXIII

When Jacky's father—with that honest young kiss warm upon his cheek—reached the little "two-family" house, he saw the red sign on the door: Scarlet Fever.

"He's got it," he thought, fiercely; "but why in hell did she send for me?—and a telegram!—to the house! She's mad." He was panting with anger as he pressed the button at Lily's door; "I'll tell her I'll never see her again, long as I live!" Furious words were on the tip of his tongue; then she opened the door, and he was dumb.

"Oh, Mr. Curtis—don't—don't let them take Jacky! Oh, Mr. Curtis!" She flung herself upon him, sobbing frantically. "Don't let them—I'll kill them if they touch Jacky! Oh, my soul and body! He'll die if they take him—I won't let them take him—" She was shaking and stammering and gasping. "I won't have him touched.... You got to stop them—"

"Lily, don't! What's the matter?"

"This woman downstairs 's about crazy, because she has three children. I hope they all catch it and die and go to hell! She's shut up there with 'em in her flat. She won't put her nose outside the door! She come up here this morning, and saw Jacky, and she said it was scarlet fever. Seems she knew what it was, 'cause she had a boy die of it—glad he did! And she sent—the slut!—a complaint to the Board of Health—and the doctor, he come this afternoon, and said it was! And he said he was going to take Jacky to-night!"

Her voice made him cringe; her yellow tigress eyes blazed at him; he had known that Lily, for all her good humor, had occasional sharp gusts of temper, little squalls that raced over summer seas of kindliness! But he had never seen this Lily: A ferocious, raucous Lily, madly maternal! A Lily of the pavements.... "An' I said he wasn't going to do no such thing! An' I said I'd stop it: I said I'd take the law to him; I said I'd get Jacky's father: I—"

"Good God! Lily—"

"Oh, what do I care about you? I ain't goin' to kill Jacky to protect you! You got to stop them taking him!" She clutched his arm and shook it: "I never asked nothing of you, yet. I ask it now, and you'll do it, or I'll tell everybody in town that he's yours—" Her menacing voice broke and failed, but her lips kept moving; those kind, efficient hands of hers, clutching at him, were the claws of a mother beast. Maurice took her arm and guided her into the little parlor, where a row of hyacinths on the window sill made the air overpoweringly sweet; he sat down beside her on the sofa.

"Get steady, Lily, and tell me: I'll see what can be done. But there's to be no father business about it, you understand? I'm just a 'friend.'"

So, stammering and breaking into sobs and even whispered screams, and more outrageous abuse of her fellow tenant, she told him: It was scarlet fever, and there were children in the house. The Board of Health, "sicked on by that damned woman," said that Jacky must go to the hospital—to the contagious ward. "And the doctor said he'd be better off there; he said they could do for him better than me—me, his mother! They're going to send a ambulance—I telegraphed you at four o'clock—and here it is six! You must have got it by five—why didn't you come? Oh—my God, Jacky!" Her suffering was naked; shocking to witness! It made Maurice forget his own dismay.

"I was out," he began to explain, "and—"

But she went on, beads of foam gathering in the corners of her mouth: "I didn't telephone, for fear she'd get on to it." He could see that she was angry at her own consideration. "I'd ought to have sent for you when he come down with it!" ... Where had he been all this time, anyway!—and her nearly out of her head thinkin' this rotten woman downstairs was sicking the Board o' Health on to her! "And look how I've washed her father for her! I'll spit on him if—if—if anything happens to Jacky. Yes, I tell you, and you mind what I say: If Jacky dies, I'll kill her—my soul and body, I'll kill her anyway!"

"Lily, get steady. I'll fix things for you. I'll go to the Board of Health and see what can be done; just as—as a friend of yours, you understand."

From the next room came a wailing voice: "Maw—"

"Yes, Sweety; in a minute—" She grasped Maurice's hand, clung to it, kissed it. "Mr. Curtis, I'll never make trouble for you after this! Oh, I'll go to New York, and live there, if you want me to. I'll do anything, if you just make 'em leave Jacky! (Yes, darling Sweety, maw's coming.) You'll do it? Oh, I knew you'd do it!" She ran out of the room.

He got up, beside himself with perplexity: but even as he tried to think what on earth he could do, the doctor came. The ambulance would arrive, he said, with bored cheerfulness, in twenty minutes. Lily, rushing from Jacky's bedside, flew at him with set teeth, her trembling hands gripping the white sleeve of his linen jacket.

"This gentleman's a friend of mine," she said, jerking her head toward Maurice; "he says you shan't carry Jacky off!"

The doctor's relief at having a man to talk to was obvious. And while Maurice was trying to get in a word, there came another whimper from the room where Jacky lay, red and blotched, talking brokenly to himself: "Maw!" Lily ran to him, leaving the two men alone.

"Thank Heaven!" the doctor said; "I'd about as soon argue with a hornet as a mother. She's nearly crazy! I'll tell you the situation." He told it, and Maurice listened, frowning.

"What can be done?" he said; "I—I am only an acquaintance; I hardly know Mrs. Dale; but she sent for me. She's frantic at the idea of the boy being taken away from her."

"He'll have to be taken away! Besides, he'll have ten times better care in the hospital than he could have here."

"Can she go with him?" Maurice said.

"Why, if she can afford to take a private room—"

"Good heavens! money's no object; anything to keep her from doing some wild thing!"

"You a relation?" the doctor asked.

"Not the slightest. I—knew her husband."

"The thing for you to do," said the doctor, "is to hustle right out to a telephone; call up the hospital. Get Doctor Nelson, if you can—"

"Nelson!"

"Yes; if not, get Baker; tell him I—" then followed concise directions; "But try and get Nelson; he's the top man. They're frightfully crowded, and if you fool with understrappers, you'll get turned down. I'd do it, but I've got to stay here and see that she doesn't get perfectly crazy."

Almost before the doctor finished his directions, Maurice was rushing downstairs.... That next half hour was a nightmare. He ran up the street, slippery with ice; saw over a drug store the blue sign of the public telephone, and dashed in—to wait interminably outside the booth! A girl in a silly hat was drawling into the transmitter. Once Maurice, pacing frantically up and down, heard her flat laugh; then, to his dismay, he saw her, through the glass of the door, instead of hanging up the receiver, drop a coin into the slot....

"Damn! Another five minutes!"

He turned and struck his fist on the counter. "Why the devil don't you have two booths here?" he demanded.

The druggist, lounging against the soda-water fountain, smiled calmly: "You can search me. Ask the company."

"Can't you stop that woman? My business is important. For God's sake pull her out!"

"She's telephoning her beau, I guess. Who's going to stop a lady telephoning her beau? Not me."

The feather gave a last flirtatious jerk—and the booth was empty.

Maurice, closing its double doors, and shutting himself into the tiny box where the fetid air seemed to take him by the throat and the space was so narrow he could hardly crowd his long legs into it, rushed into another delay. Wrong number! ... When at last he got the right number and the hospital, there were the usual deliberate questions; and the, "I'll connect you with So-and-so's desk." Maurice, sitting with the receiver to his ear, could feel the blood pounding in his temples. His mind whirled with the possibilities of what Lily might say in his absence: "She'll tell the doctor my name—" As his wire was connected, first with one authority and then with another, each authority asked the same question, "Are you one of the family?" And to each he gave the same answer, "No; a friend; the doctor asked me to call you up."

Finally came the voice of the "top man"—the voice which had spoken in Lily's narrow hall six years ago, the voice which had joked with Edith at the Mortons' dinner party, the voice which had burst into extravagant guffaws under the silver poplar in his own garden—Doctor Nelson's voice—curt, impersonal: "Who is this speaking?"

Then Maurice's voice, disguised into a gruff treble, "A friend."

"One of the family?"

"No."

Five minutes later Maurice, coming out of that horrible little booth, the matter arranged at an expense which, later, would give Jacky's father some bad moments, was cold from head to foot. When he reached Lily's house the ambulance was waiting at the door. Upstairs, the doctor said, "Well?"

And Lily said: "Did you do it? If you didn't, I'll—"

"I did," Maurice said. Then he asked if he could be of any further service.

"No; the orderly will get him downstairs. He's too heavy for Mrs. Dale to carry. She's got her things all ready. You—" he said, smiling at Maurice, "Mr.—? I didn't get your name. You look all in!"

Maurice shook his head: "I'm all right. Mrs. Dale will you step in here? I want to speak to you a minute." As Lily preceded him into the dining room, he said, quickly, to the doctor, "I want to tell her not to worry about money, you know." To Lily—when he closed the door—he was briefly ruthless: "I'll pay for everything. But I just want to say, if he dies—"

She screamed out, "No—no!"

"He won't," he said, angrily; "but if he does, you are to say his father's dead. Do you understand? Say his name was—what did you call it?—William?"

"I don't know. My God! what difference does it make? Call it anything! John."

"Well, say his father was John Dale of New York, and he's dead. Promise me!"

She promised—"Honest to God!" her face was furrowed with fright. As they went back to the doctor Maurice had a glimpse of Lily's bedroom, where Jacky, rolled in a blanket, was vociferating that he would not be carried downstairs by the orderly.

"Oh, Sweety," Lily entreated; "see, nice pretty gentleman! Let him carry you?"

"Won't," said Jacky.

At which Maurice said, decidedly: "Behave yourself, Jacobus! I'll carry you."

Instantly Jacky stopped crying: "You throwed away the present I give you," he said; "but," he conceded, "you may carry me."

The doctor objected. "It isn't safe—"

"Oh, let's get it over," Maurice said, sharply; "I shan't see any children. It's safe enough! Anything to stop this scene!"

The bothered doctor half consented, and Maurice lifted Jacky, very gently; as he did so, the little fellow somehow squirmed a hand out of the infolding blanket, and made a hot clutch for his father's ear; he gripped it so firmly that, in spite of Maurice's wincing expostulation, he pulled the big blond head over sidewise until it rested on his own little head. That burning grip held Maurice prisoner all the way downstairs; it chained him to the child until they reached the street. There the clutch relaxed, but for one poignant moment, as Maurice lifted Jacky into the ambulance, father and son looked into each other's eyes, and Maurice said—the words suddenly tumbling from his lips:

"Now, my little Jacky, you'll be good, won't you?" Then the ambulance rolled softly away, and he stood on the curbstone and felt his heart swelling in his throat: "Why did I say 'my'?" As he walked home he tried to explain the possessing word away: "Of course I'd say 'my' to any child; it didn't mean anything! But suppose the orderly had heard me?" Even while he thus denied the Holy Spirit within him, he was feeling again that hot, ridiculous tug on his ear. "I was the only one who could manage him," he thought.... "Of course what I said didn't mean anything."

He stopped on the bridge and looked down into the water—black and swift and smooth between floating cakes of ice. Now and then a star glimmered on a slipping ripple; on the iron bridge farther up the river a row of lights were strung like a necklace across the empty darkness.... Somewhere, in the maze of streets at one end of the bridge, was Eleanor, lying in bed with a desperate headache. Somewhere, in the maze of streets at the other end of the bridge, was Lily, taking "his" little Jacky to the hospital. Somewhere, on one of the hillsides beyond Medfield, was Edith in the schoolhouse. And Eleanor was loving him and trusting him; and Lily was "blessing him" (so she had told him) for his goodness; and Edith was "betting on him"! ... "I wonder if anybody was ever as rotten as I am?" Maurice pondered.

Then he forgot his "rottenness," and smiled. "He obeyed me! Lily couldn't do a thing with him; what did he mean about the 'present'? I believe it was that old cigar! He must have seen me pitch it into the gutter. He wanted me to carry him; wouldn't look at that orderly! What made him grab my ear?"

When Maurice said that, down, down, under his rage at Lily, under his fear of exposure, under his nauseating disgust at himself—something stirred, something fluttered. The tremor of a moral conception:

Paternal pride.

"What a grip!"



CHAPTER XXIV

After a tornado comes quietness; again the sun shines, and birds sing, and many small things look up, unhurt. It was incredible to Maurice, eating his breakfast the next morning, reading his paper, opening his letters, and glancing at a pale Eleanor, heavy-eyed and silent, that his world was still the same world that it had been before he had picked up the sealed telegram on the hall table. He asked Eleanor how she felt; told her to take care of herself; said he'd not be at home to dinner, and went off to his office.... He was safe! Those two minutes in the dining room of Lily's flat, while the white-jacketed orderly was trying to persuade the protesting Jacky to let him carry him downstairs, had removed any immediate alarm; Lily had promised not to communicate with Jacky's father.

So Maurice, walking to the office, told himself that everything was all right—but "a close call!" Then he thought of Jacky, who, at his command, had so instantly "behaved himself"; and of that grip on his ear; and again that pang of something he did not recognize made him swallow hard. "Poor little beggar!" he thought: "I wonder how he is? I wonder if he'll pull through?" He hoped he would. "Tough on Lily, if anything happens." But his anxiety—though he did not know it—was not entirely on Lily's account. For the first time in the child's life, Maurice was aware of Jacky as a possession. The tornado of the night before—the anger and fear and pity—had plowed down below the surface of his mind, and touched that subsoil of conscious responsibility for creation, the realization that, whether through love or through selfishness, the man who brings a child into this terrible, squalid, glorious world, is a creator, even as God is the Creator. So Maurice, sitting at his desk that next day, answering a client on the telephone, or making an appointment to go and "look at a house," was really feeling in his heart—not love, of course, but a consciousness of his own relation to that little flushed, suffering body out in the contagious ward of the hospital in Medfield. "Will he pull through?" Maurice asked himself. It was six years ago that, standing at the door of a yellow-brick apartment house, with two fingers looped through the strings of a box of roses, Jacky's father had said, "Perhaps it will be born dead!" How dry his lips had been that day with the hope of death! Now, suddenly, his lips were dry with fear that the kid wouldn't pull through—which would be "tough on Lily." His face was stern with this new emotion of anxiety which was gradually becoming pain; he even forgot how scared he had been at the thought that Eleanor might have opened that telegram. "I swear, I wish I hadn't hurt his feelings about that cigar stub!" he said. Then he remembered Eleanor: "I could wring Lily's neck!" But Eleanor hadn't opened the telegram; and Maurice hoped Jacky would get well—because "it would be tough on Lily" if he didn't. Thus he dismissed his wife. So long as Lily's recklessness had not done any harm, it was easy to dismiss her—so very far had she receded into the dull, patiently-to-be-endured, background of life!

The Eleanor of the next few weeks, who seemed just a little more melancholy and silent than usual, a little more devoted to old Bingo, did not attract his attention in any way. But when Edith came in on the following Sunday, he had his wife sufficiently on his mind to say, in a quick aside:

"Edith, don't give me away on being sort of upset last Sunday night, will you?" (As he spoke, he remembered that swift kiss. "Nice little Skeezics!" he thought.) But he finished his sentence with perfect matter-of-factness: "it was just a—a little personal worry. I don't want Eleanor bothered, you understand?"

"Of course," said Edith, gravely

And so it was that in another month or two, with reliance upon Edith's discretion, and satisfaction in a recovering Jacky, the track of the tornado in Maurice's mind was quite covered up with the old, ugly, commonplace of furtive security. In the security Maurice was conscious, in a kindly way, that poor old Eleanor looked pretty seedy; so he brought her some flowers once in a while; not as often as he would have liked to, for, though he had more money now, eight weeks of a private room in a hospital "kind o' makes a dent in your income," Maurice told himself; "but I don't begrudge it," he thought; "I'm glad the kid got well."

So, after that night of terror and turmoil,—when Eleanor had fainted—Maurice's life in his own house settled again into the old tranquil forlornness, enlivened only by those Sunday-afternoon visits from Edith.

And Eleanor?... There had been some dumb days, when she moved about the house or sat opposite Maurice at table, or exercised Bingo, like an automaton. Sometimes she sat at her window, looking down through the bare branches of the poplar at the still, wintry garden; the painted table, heaped with grimy snow slowly melting in the chill March sunshine; the dead stalks of the lilies on each side of the icy bricks of the path; the rusty bars of the iron gate, through which, now and then, came the glimmer, a block away, of the river—"their river"! Sometimes for an hour her mind numbly considered these things; then would come a fierce throb of pain: "He was all the time saying he 'couldn't afford' things; that was so he could give her money, I suppose?" Then blank listlessness again. She did not suffer very much. She was too stunned to suffer. She merely said to herself, vaguely, "I'll leave him." It may have been on the third day that, when she said, "I will leave him; he has been false to me," her mind whispered back, very faintly, like an echo, "He has been false to himself." For just a moment she loved him enough to think that he had sinned. Maurice has sinned! When she said that, the dismay of it made her forget herself. She said it with horror, and after a while she added a question: "Why did he do it?" Then came beating its way up through anger and wounded pride, and suffering love, still another question: "Was it my fault that he did it? Did he fall in love with that frightful woman because I failed him?" Instantly her mind sheered off from this question: "I did everything I knew how to make him happy! I would have died to make him happy. I adored him! How could he care for that common, ignorant woman I saw on the porch? A woman who wasn't a lady. A—a bad woman!" But yet the question repeated itself: "Why? Why?" It demanded an answer: Why did Maurice—high-minded, pure-hearted, overflowing with a love as beautiful, and as perfect as Youth itself—how could Maurice be drawn to such a woman? And by and by the answer struggled to her lips, tearing her heart as it came with dreadful pain: "He did it because I didn't make him happy."

Just as Maurice, recognizing the responsibility of creation, had, at the touch of his son's little hand, felt the tremor of a moral conception, so now Eleanor, barren so long! felt the pangs of a birth of spiritual responsibility: "I didn't make him happy, so—Oh, my poor Maurice, it was my fault!"... But of course this divine self-forgetfulness in self-reproach, was as feeble as any new-born thing. When it stirred, and uttered little elemental sounds—"my fault, my fault"—she forgot the wrong he had done her, in seeing the wrong he had done himself.... "Oh, my Maurice—my Maurice!" But most of the time she did not hear this frail cry of the sense of sin! She thought entirely and angrily of herself; she said, over and over, that she was going to leave him. She was absorbed in hideous and poignant imaginings, based on that organic curiosity which is experienced only by the woman who meditates upon "the other woman." When these visions overwhelmed her, she said she wouldn't leave him—she would hold him! She wouldn't give him up to that frightful creature, whom he—kissed.... "Oh, my God! He kisses her!" No; she wouldn't give him up; she would just accuse him; just tell him she knew he had been false; tell him there was no use lying about it! Then, perhaps, say she would forgive him?... Yes; if he would promise to throw the vile woman over, she would forgive him. She did not, of course, reflect that forgiveness is not a thing that can be promised; it cannot be manufactured. It comes in exact proportion as we love the sinner more and self less.

And forgiveness is not forgetfulness! It is more love.

Eleanor did not know this. So, except for those occasional cooling and divine moments of blaming herself, she scorched and shriveled in the flames of self-love. And as usual, she was speechless. There were many of these silent hours (which were such a matter of course to Maurice that he never noticed them!) before she gathered herself together, and decided that she would not leave him. She would fight! How? "Oh, I can't think!" she moaned. So those first days passed—days of impotent determinations, which whirled and alternated, and contradicted each other.

Once Maurice, glancing at her over his newspaper at breakfast, thought to himself, "She hasn't said a word since she got up! Poor Eleanor!..." Then he remembered how he had once supposed these silences of hers were full of things too lovely and profound for words! He frowned, and read the sporting page, and forgot her silences, and her, too. But he did not forget Jacky. "I'll buy the kid a ball," he was thinking....

So the days passed, and each day Eleanor dredged her silences, to find words: "What shall I say to him?" for of course she must say something! She must "have it out with him," as the phrase is. Sometimes she would decide to burst into a statement of the fact: "Somebody called 'L. D.' has a claim upon you, because she sends for you when 'Jacky' is sick. I am certain that 'Jacky' is your child! I am certain that 'L.D.' is Mrs. Dale. I am certain that you don't love me...." And he would say—Then her heart would stand still: What would he say? He would say, "I stopped loving you because you are old." And to that would come her own terrible assent: "I had no right to marry him—he was only nineteen. I had no right..." (Thus did that new-born sense of her own complicity in Maurice's sin raise its feeble voice!) And little by little the Voice became stronger: "I didn't make him happy not because I was old, but because I was selfish...." So, in alternating gusts of anger and fear, and outraged pride,—and self-forgetting horror for Maurice,—her soul began to awake. Again and again she counted the reasons why he had not been happy, beginning with the obvious reason, his youth and her age: But that did not explain it. "We had no children." That did not explain it! Nor, "I wasn't a good housekeeper"; nor, "I didn't do things with him ... I didn't skate, and walk, and joke with him"; nor, "I didn't entertain him. Auntie always said men must be entertained. I—I am stupid." There was no explanation in such things; neither dullness nor inefficiency was enough to drive a man like Maurice Curtis into dishonor or faithlessness! Then came the real explanation—which jealousy so rarely puts into words: "I was selfish." At first, this bleak truthfulness was only momentary. Almost immediately she was swept from the noble pain of knowing that Maurice had been false to himself; swept from the sense of her own share in that falseness, swept back to the insult to herself! Back to self-love. With this was the fear that if she accused him, if she told him that she knew he was false to her, if she made him very angry, he would leave her, and go and live with this woman—who had given him a child ... Yet every morning when she got up, she would say to herself, "I'll tell him to-day." And every night when she went to bed, "To-morrow."

Still she did not "have it out with him." Then weeks pushed in between her and that Sunday afternoon when the resealed telegram had been put on the hall table. And by and by it was a month, and still she could not speak. And after a while it was June—June, and the anniversary (which Maurice happened to forget, and to which Eleanor's suffering love would not permit her to refer!). By that June day, that marked nine of the golden fifty years, Eleanor had done what many another sad and injured woman has done—dug a grave in her heart, and buried Trust and Pride in it; and then watched the grave night and day. Sometimes, as she watched, her thought was: "If he would tell me the truth, even now, I would forgive him. It is his living a lie, every day, every minute, that I can't bear!" Then she would look at Maurice—sitting at the piano, perhaps, playing dreamily, or standing up in front of the fireplace filling his pipe, and poking old Bingo with his foot and telling him he was getting too fat; "You're 'losin' your figger,' Bingo!" Eleanor, looking and listening, would say to herself, "Is he thinking of Mrs. Dale, now?" And all day long, when she was alone (watching the grave), she would think: "Where is he now? Is he with her? Oh, I think I will follow him,—and watch.... Was he with her last night when he said he had gone to the theater? ... Is he lying to me when he says he has to go away on business, and is he really with her? It's the lying I can't bear! If only he would not lie to me!... Does she call him 'Maurice'? Perhaps she called him 'darling'?" The thought of an intimacy like that, was oil on the vehement flame!

"You look dreadfully, Eleanor," Mrs. Newbolt told her once, her pale, protruding eyes full of real anxiety. "I'd go and see a doctor, if I were you."

"I'm well enough," Eleanor said, listlessly.

"At your age," said her aunt, "you never can tell what's goin' on inside! Here's a piece of candy for Bingo—he's too fat. My dear father used to say that a man's soul and his gizzard could hold a lot of secrets. It's the same with women. So look out for your gizzard. Here, Bingo!"

Eleanor was silent. She had just come from Mrs. O'Brien's, where she had given the slowly failing Donny a happy hour, and she was tired. Mrs. Newbolt found her alone in the garden, sitting under the shimmering silver poplar. The lilies were just coming into bloom, and on the age-blackened iron trellis of the veranda the wistaria had flung its purple scarves among the thin fringes of its new leaves. The green tea table was bare: "I'd give you a cup of tea," Eleanor said, "but Maurice is going out to dinner, so I told Mary not to keep the fire up, just for me."

"Maurice goin' out to dinner! Why, it's your weddin' day! Eleanor, if I have one virtue, it's candor: Maurice oughtn't to be out to dinner so much—and on your anniversary, too! Of course, it's just what I expected when you married him; but that's done, and I'm not one to keep throwin' it up at you. If you want to hold him, now, you've got to keep your figger, and set a good table. Yes, and leave the door open! Edith has a figger. She entertains him, just the way I used to entertain your dear uncle—by talkin'. I'd have Bingo put away, if I were you; he's too old to be comfortable. You got to make him want to sit by the fire and knit! But here you are, sittin' by yourself, lookin' like a dead fish. A man don't like a dead fish—unless it's cooked! I used to broil shad for your dear uncle." For an instant she had no words to express that culinary perfection by which she had kept the deceased Mr. Newbolt's stomach faithful to her. "Yes, you've got to be entertainin', or else he'll go up the chimney, and out to dinner, and forget what Day it is!"

Eleanor's sudden pallor made her stop midway in her torrent of frankness; it was then she said, again, really alarmed: "See a doctor! You know," she added, jocosely; "if you die, he'll marry Edith; and you wouldn't like that!"

"No," Eleanor said, faintly, "I wouldn't like that."



CHAPTER XXV

When a rather shaky Jacky was discharged from the hospital, Lily notified Maurice of his recovery and added that she had moved.

I couldn't [Lily wrote] go back to that woman who turned me out when Jacky was sick: so I got me a little house on Maple Street—way down at the far end from where I was before, so you needn't worry about anybody seeing me. My rent's higher, but there's a swell church on the next street. I meant to move, anyway, because I found out that there was a regular huzzy living in the next house on Ash Street, painted to beat the band! And I don't want Jacky to see that kind. I've got five mealers. But eggs is something fierce. I am writing these few lines to say Jacky's well, and I hope they find you in good health. It was real nice in you to fix that up at the hospital for me. I hope you'll come and see us one of these days.

Your friend,

LILY.

P.S.—Of course I'm sorry for her poor old father.

Reading this, Maurice said to himself that it would be decent to go and see Lily; which meant, though he didn't know it, that he wanted to see Jacky. He wasn't aware of anything in the remotest degree like affection for the child; he just had this inarticulate purpose of seeing him, which took the form of saying that it would be "decent" to inquire about him. However, he did not yield to this formless wish until June. Then, on that very afternoon when Mrs. Newbolt had been so shatteringly frank to Eleanor, he walked down to the "far end of Maple Street." And as he walked, he suddenly remembered that it was "The Day"! "Great Scott! I forgot it!" he thought. "Funny, Eleanor didn't remind me. Maybe she's forgotten, too?" But he frowned at the bad taste of such an errand on such a day, and would have turned back—but at that moment he saw what (with an eagerness of which he was not conscious!) he had been looking for—a tow-headed boy, who, pulling a reluctant dog along by a string tied around his neck, was following a hand organ. And Maurice forgot his wedding anniversary!

He freed the half-choked puppy, and told his son what he thought. But Jacky, glaring up at the big man who interfered with his joys, told his father what he thought:

"If I was seven years old, I'd lick the tar out of you! But I'm six, going on seven."

Maurice, looking down on this miniature self, was, to his astonishment, quite diverted. "You need a licking yourself, young man! Is your mother at home?"

Jacky wouldn't answer.

Maurice took a quarter out of his pocket and held it up. "Know what that is?"

Jacky, advancing slowly, looked at the coin, but made no response.

"Come back to the house and find your mother, and I'll give it to you."

Jacky, keeping at a displeased distance behind the visitor, followed him to his own gate, then darted into the house, yelled, "Maw!" returned, and held out his hand.

Maurice gave him the quarter and went into the parlor, where the south window was full of plants, and the sunshine was all a green fragrance of rose geraniums. When a shiningly clean, smiling Lily appeared—evidently from the kitchen, for she was carrying a plate of hot gingerbread—she found Maurice sitting down, his hands in his pockets, his long legs stretched out in front of him, baiting Jacky with questions, and chuckling at the courageous impudence of the youngster.

"He's no fool," said Maurice to himself. "This kid is a handful!" he told Lily ... "You're a bully cook!"

"You bet he is!" Lily said, proudly. "Have another piece? I've got to take some over to Ash Street for that poor old man.... Oh yes; I was kind of put out at his daughter. Wouldn't you think, if anyone was enough of a lady to wash your father, you wouldn't go to the Board of Health about her? But there! The old gentleman's silly, so I have to take him some gingerbread.... Say, I must tell you something funny—he's the cutest young one! I gave him five cents for the missionary box, and he went and bought a jew's-harp! I had to laugh, it was so cute in him. But I declare, sometimes I don't know what I'm going to do with him, he's that fresh!"

"Spank him," Maurice advised.

Lily looked annoyed; "He suits me—and he belongs to me."

"Of course he does! You needn't think that I—" he paused; something would not let him finish those denying words: "that I—want him." Jacky, standing with stocky legs wide apart, his hands behind him, his fearless blue eyes looking right into Maurice's, made his father's heart quicken. Jacky was Lily's, of course, but—

So they looked at each other—the big, blond, handsome father and the little son—and Jacky said, "Mr. Curtis, does God see everything?"

"Why, yes," Maurice said, rather confused, "He does; Jacky. So," he ended, with proper solemnity, "you must be a very good boy."

"Why," said Jacky, "will He get one in on me if I ain't?"

"So I'm told," said Maurice.

"Does He see everything?" Jacky pressed, frowning; and Maurice said:

"Yes, sir! Everything."

Jacky reflected and sighed. "Well," he said, "I should think He'd laugh when he sees your shoes."

"Why! what's the matter with my shoes?" his discomfited father said, looking down at his feet. "My shoes are all right!" he defended himself.

"Big," Jacky said, shyly.

Maurice roared, crushed a geranium leaf in his hand, and asked his son what he was going to be when he grew up; "Theology seems to be your long suit, Jacobus. Better go into the Church."

Jacky shook his head. "I'm going to be a enginair. Or a robber."

"I'd try engineering if I were you. People don't like robbers."

"But I'll be a nice robber," Jacky explained, anxiously.

"I'll bring you a train of cars some day," Maurice said.

"Say, 'Thank you,' Jacky," Lily instructed him.

Again Jacky shook his head. "He 'ain't gimme the cars yet."

Maurice was immensely amused. "He wants the goods before he signs a receipt! I'll buy some cars for him."

"My soul and body!" said Lily, following him to the door; "that boy gets 'round everybody! Well, what do you suppose? I go to church with him! Ain't that rich? Me! He don't like church—though he's crazy about the music. But I take him. And I don't have to listen to what the man says. I just plan out the food for a week. Sometimes,"—her amber eyes were lovely with anxiously pondering love—"sometimes I don't know but what I'll make a preacher of him? Some preachers marry money, and get real gentlemanly. And then again I think I'd rather have him a clubman. But, anyway, I'm savin' up every last cent to educate him!"

"He's worth it," Maurice said, and there was pride in his voice; "yes, we must—I mean, you must educate him."

On his way home, stopping to buy some flowers for his wife, Maurice found himself thinking of Jacky as a boy ... as a mighty bright boy, who must be educated. As—his boy!

"You forgot the day," he challenged Eleanor, good-naturedly, when he handed her the violets.

She said, briefly, "No; I hadn't forgotten."

The pain in her worn face made him wince.... But he was able to forget it in thinking of the toys he had ordered for Jacky on the way home. "I'd like to see him playing with them," he said to himself, reflecting upon the track, and the engine, and the very expensive wonder of a tiny snow plow. But he didn't yield to the impulse to see the boy for a month. For one thing, he was afraid to. The recollection of that day when Lily's doorstep had been the edge of a volcano still made him shiver; and as Eleanor had briefly but definitely refused to take her usual "vacation" at Green Hill without him, there was no time when he could be sure that she would not wander out to Medfield! So it was not until one August afternoon, when he knew that she was going to a concert, that he went to Maple Street. But first he bought a top;—and just as he was leaving the office, he went back and rummaged in a pigeonhole in his desk and found a tiny gilt hatchet; "it will amuse him," he thought, cynically.

Lily was not at home; but Jacky was sitting on the back doorstep, twanging his jew's-harp. He was shy at first, and tongue-tied; then wildly excited on learning that there were "presents" in Mr. Curtis's pocket. When the top was produced, he dropped his jew's-harp to watch it spin on a string held between Maurice's hands; then he devoted himself to the hatchet, and chopped his father's knee, energetically. "Pity there's no cherry tree round," said Maurice; "Look here, Jacobus, I want you always to tell the truth. Understand?"

"Huh?" said Jacky. However, under the spell of his gifts he became quite conversational; he said that one of these here automobiles drooled a lot of oil. "An' it ran into the gutter. An' say, Mr. Curtis, I saw a rainbow in a puddle. An' say, it was handsome." After that he got out his locomotive and its cars. Maurice mended a broken switch for him, and then they laid the tracks on the kitchen floor, and the big father and the little son pushed the train under a table; that was a roundhouse, Maurice told Jacky. ("Why don't they have a square house?" Jacky said); and beneath the lounge—which was a tunnel, the bigger boy announced ("What is a tunnel?" said Jacky)—and over Lily's ironing board stretched between two stools; "That's a trestle." ("What grows trestles?" Jacky demanded.) Exercise, and a bombardment of questions, brought the perspiration out on Maurice's forehead. He took off his coat, and arranged the tracks so that the switches would stop derailing trains. In the midst of it the door opened, and Jacky said, sighing, "Maw."

Lily came in, smiling and good-natured, and very red-faced with the fatigue of carrying a hideous leprous-leaved begonia she had bought; but when she saw the intimacy of the railroad, she frowned. "He'll wear out his pants, crawling round that way," she said, sharply. "Now, you get up, Jacky, and don't be bothering Mr. Curtis."

"He brung me two presents. I like presents. Mr. Curtis, does God eat stars?"

"God doesn't eat," Maurice said, amused; "I'd say 'brought,' instead of 'brung,' if I were you."

"Hasn't He got any mouth?" Jacky said, appalled.

"Well, no," Maurice began (entering that path of unanswerable questions in which all parents are ordained to walk); "You see, God—why, God, He hasn't any mouth. He—"

"Has He got a beak?" Jacky said, intensely interested.

"Lily, for Heaven's sake," Maurice implored, "doesn't he ever stop?"

"Never," said Lily, resignedly, "except when he's asleep. And nobody can answer him. But I wish he'd let up on God. I tell him whatever pops into my head. When it comes to God, I guess one thing 's as true as another. Anyway, nobody can prove it ain't."

Just as Maurice was going away, his theological son detained him by a little clutch at his coat. "I'll give you a present next time you come," Jacky said, shyly.

Even the hope of a present did not lure Maurice out to Maple Street very soon. But it was self-preservation, as well as fear of discovery, which kept him away. "If I saw much of him I might—well, get kind of fond of the little beggar."

The same thought may have occurred to Lily; at any rate, when, four weeks later, Jacky's father came again; she didn't welcome him in quite her old, sweet, hospitable way; but Jacky welcomed him!... Jacky knew his mother as his slave; he showed her an absent-minded affection when he wanted to get anything out of her; but he knew Mr. Curtis as "The Man"—the man who "ordered him round," to be sure, but who gave him presents and who,—Jacky boasted to some of his gutter companions,—"could spit two feet farther than the p'leesman."

"Aw, how do you know?" the other boys scoffed.

Jacky, evading the little matter of evidence, said, haughtily, "I know."

When "The Man" declared that next fall Jacky was to go to school, regularly, and not according to his own sweet will, Jacky waited until he was alone with his mother to kick and scream and say he wouldn't. Lily slapped him, and said, "Mr. Curtis will give you a present if you're on time every morning!"

She told Maurice to what she had committed him: "You see, I'm bound to educate him, and make a gentleman of him, so he can have an automobile, and marry a society girl. No chippy is going to get Jacky—smoking cigarettes, and saying 'La! La!' to any man that comes along. I hate those cheap girls. Look at the paint on 'em. I don't see how they have the face to show themselves on the street! Well, I can't make him prompt at school; but he'll be Johnny-on-the-spot if you say so. My soul and body, he'll do anything for you! He's saved up all his prayer money and bought a lot of chewing gum for you."

"Great Scott!" said Maurice, appalled at the experimental obligations which his son's gift might involve.

"So I told him that next winter you'd give him a box of candy every Saturday if he was on time all the week. I ain't asking you to go to any expense," she pleaded; "I'll buy the candy. But you promise him—"

"I'll promise him a spanking if he's not on time, once," Maurice retorted; "for Heaven's sake, Lily, let up on spoiling him!"

At which Lily said: "He's my boy! I guess I know how to bring him up!"

Maurice, the next morning, looking across his breakfast table at Eleanor and remembering this remark, said to himself: "Lily needn't worry; I don't want him—and I couldn't have him if I did! But what is going to become of him?"

His new, slowly awakening sense of responsibility expressed itself in this unanswerable question, which irritated his mind as a splinter might have irritated his flesh. He thought of it constantly—thought of it when Eleanor sang (with a slurred note once or twice), "O sweet, O sweet content!" Thought of it when his conscience reminded him that he must have tea with her in the garden under the poplar on Sunday afternoons. Thought of it when he and she went up to the Houghtons', to spend Labor Day (she would not go without him!). Perhaps the thing that gave him some moments of forgetfulness was a quite different irritation which he felt when, on reaching Green Hill, he discovered that John Bennett, too, was spending Labor Day in the mountains. Johnny had come he said, to see his father.... "I wouldn't have known it if he hadn't mentioned it!" said Doctor Bennett; for, Johnny practically lived at the Houghtons', where Edith was so painstakingly kind to him that he was a good deal discouraged; but the two families made pleasing deductions! Mary Houghton intimated as much to Maurice.

"What!" he said. "Are they engaged?"

"Well, no; not yet."

There was a little pause; then Maurice (this was one of the moments when he forgot Jacky's future!) said, with great heartiness, "Old John's in luck!" He and Mrs. Houghton were sitting on the porch in that somnolent hour after dinner, before she went upstairs to take a nap, and Maurice should go over to the Bennetts' for singles with Johnny; Eleanor was resting. Out on the lawn in the breezy sun and shadow under the tulip tree, Edith, fresh from a shampoo, was reading. Now and then she tossed her head like a colt, to make her fluffy hair blow about in a glittering brown nimbus.

Maurice got up and sauntered over to her. "Coming to see me wallop Johnny?"

"Maybe; if my horrid old hair ever dries."

Maurice looked at the "horrid old hair," and wished he could put out his hand and touch it. He was faintly surprised at himself that he didn't do it! "How mad I used to make her when I pulled her hair!" Now, he couldn't even put a finger on it. He remembered the night of Lily's distracted telegram, when he had taken Edith to Fern Hill, and she had "bet on him," and had been again, just for an instant, so entirely the "little girl" of their old frank past, that she had kissed him! "So, why can't I touch her hair, now?" he pondered; "we are just like brother and sister." But he knew he couldn't. Aloud, he said, "Don't be lazy, Skeezics," and lounged off toward Doctor Bennett's. His face was heavy.

At the doctor's, John, sitting on a gate post, waiting for him, yelled, derisively: "You're late! 'Fraid of getting walloped? Where's Buster?"

"She's forgotten all about you. Get busy!" Maurice commanded.

They played, neither of them with much zest, and both of them with glances toward the road. The walloping was fairly divided; but it was Maurice who gave out first, and said he had to go home. ("Eleanor'll be hunting for me, the first thing I know," he thought.)

"Tell Edith I'll come over to-night," Johnny called after him.

"I'm not carrying billets-doux," Maurice retorted. "I suppose," he thought, listlessly, "it will be a short engagement." He went home by the path through the woods, and halfway back Edith met him—the shining hair dried, but inclined to tumble over her ears, so that her hat slipped about on her head. She said:

"Johnny lick you?"

"Johnny? No! He's not up to it!" They both grinned, and Maurice sat down on a wayside log to put a knot in a broken shoestring. Edith sat down, too, trying to keep her hat on, and cursing (she said) the unreliability of her hair. The shoestring mended, Maurice batted a tall fern with his racket.

"Eleanor's sort of forlorn, Maurice?" Edith said. "Generally is." He slashed at the fern, and she heard him sigh. "That time she dragged me down the mountain took it out of her."

Edith nodded; then she said, with her straight look: "You're a perfect lamb, Maurice! You are awfully"—she wanted to say "patient," but there was an implication in that; so she said, lamely—"nice to Eleanor."

"The Lord knows I ought to be!" he said, cynically.

"Yes; she just about killed herself to save you," Edith agreed.

"Oh, not because of that!"

The misery in his voice startled her; she said, quickly, "How do you mean, Maurice? I don't understand."

"I ought to be 'nice' to her."

"But you are! You are!"

"I'm not."

"Maurice, I'm awfully fond of Eleanor; you won't think I'm finding fault, or anything? But sometimes, when she doesn't feel very well, she—you—I mean, you really are a lamb, Maurice!"

Edith was twenty that summer—a strong, gay creature; but her old, ridiculous, incorrigible candor (and that honest kiss in the darkness!) made her still a child to Maurice.... Yet Johnny Bennett was going to marry her!... Maurice rested his chin on his left fist, and batted the fern; then he said:

"I've been infernally mean to Eleanor. It's little enough to be 'nice,' as you call it, now."

She flew to his defense. "Talk sense! You never did a mean thing in your life."

His shrug fired her into a frankness which she regretted the next minute. "Maurice, you are too good for Eleanor—or anybody," she ended, hastily.

He gave her a look of entreaty for understanding—though he knew, he thought, that in her ignorance of life she couldn't understand even if she had been told! Yet for the mere relief of speaking, he skirted the ugly truth:

"I can't be too patient with her when she's forlorn, because I—I haven't played the game with her."

"It's up to her to forgive that!"

"She doesn't know it."

"Maurice! You haven't a secret from Eleanor?"

Her dismay was like a stab. "Edith, I can't help it! It was a long time ago—but it would upset her to know that I'd—well, failed her in any way." His face was so wrung that Edith could have cried; but she said what she thought:

"Secrets are horrid, Maurice. You've made a mistake."

"A 'mistake'?" He almost laughed at the devilish humor of that little word 'mistake,' as applied to his ruined life. "Well, yes, Edith; I made a 'mistake,' all right."

"Oh, I don't mean a 'mistake' as to this thing you say that Eleanor wouldn't like," Edith said. "I mean not telling her."

He shook his head; with that nagging thought of Jacky in the back of his mind, it was impossible not to smile at her dogmatic ignorance.

"Because," Edith explained, "secrets trip you into fibbing."

"You bet they do! I'm quite an accomplished liar."

Edith did not smile; she spoke with impatient earnestness: "That's perfectly silly; you are not a liar! You couldn't lie to save your life, and you know it." Maurice laughed. "Why, Maurice, don't you suppose I know you, through and through? I know what you are!—a 'perfec' gentil knight.'"

She laughed, and Maurice threw up his hands.

"Bouquets," Edith conceded, grinning; "but I won't hand out any more, so you needn't fish! Well, I don't know what on earth you've done, and I don't care; and you can't tell me, of course! But one thing I do know; it isn't fair to Eleanor not to tell her, because—"

"My dear child—"

"Because she wouldn't really mind, she's so awfully devoted to you. Oh, Maurice, do tell Eleanor!" Then, even as she spoke, she was frightened; what was this thing that he did not dare to tell Eleanor?—"or me?" Edith thought. It couldn't be that Maurice—was not good? Edith quailed at herself. She had a quick impulse to say, "Forgive me, Maurice, for even thinking of such a horrid thing!" But all she said, aloud, briefly, was, "As I see it, telling Eleanor would be playing the game."

Maurice put his hand over her fist, clenched with conviction on her knee. "Skeezics," he said, "you are the soundest thing the Lord ever made! As it happens, it's a thing I can't talk about—to anybody. But I'll never forget this, Edith. And ... dear, I'm glad you're going to be happy; you deserve the best man on earth, and old Johnny comes mighty darned near being the best!"

Edith, frowning, rose abruptly. "Please don't talk that way. I hate that sort of talk! Johnny is my friend; that's all. So, please never—"

"I won't," Maurice said, meekly; but some swift exultation made him add to himself, "Poor old Johnny!" His face was radiant.

As for Edith, she hardly spoke all the way back to the house. But not because of "poor old Johnny"! She was absorbed by that intuition—which she did not, she told herself, believe. Yet it clamored in her mind: Maurice had done something wrong. Something so wrong, that he couldn't speak of it, even to her! Then it must be—? "No! that's impossible!" But with this recoil from a disgusting impossibility, came an upsurge of something she had never felt in her life—something not unlike that emotion she had once called Bingoism—a resentful consciousness that Maurice had not been as completely and confidentially her friend as she was his!

But Edith hadn't a mean fiber in her! Instantly, on the heels of that small pain came a greater and nobler pain: "I can't bear it if he has done anything wrong! But if he has, it's some wicked woman's fault." As she said that, anger at an injury done to Maurice made her almost forget that first virginal repulsion—and made her entirely forget that fleeting pain of knowing that she had not meant as much to him as he meant to her! "But he hasn't done anything wrong," she insisted; "he wouldn't look at a horrid? woman!"

"For Heaven's sake, Edith," Maurice remonstrated; "this isn't any Marathon! Go slow. I'm not in any hurry to get home."

"I am," Edith said, briefly. She was in a great hurry! She wanted to be alone, and argue to herself that she had been guilty of a dreadful disloyalty to him.... "Maurice? Why! He would be the last man in the world to—to do that,—darling old Maurice! He has simply had a crush on somebody, and likes her better than he likes Eleanor—or me; but that's nothing. Eleanor deserves it; and very likely I do, too! But he's so frightfully honorable about Eleanor—he's a perfect crank on honor!—that he blames himself for even that." By this time the possibility that the unknown somebody was "horrid" had become unthinkable; she was probably terribly attractive, and Maurice had a crush on ... "though, of course, she can't be really nice," Edith thought; "Maurice simply doesn't see through her. Boys are so stupid! They don't know girls," Again there was a Bingo moment of hot dislike for the "girl," whoever she was!—and she walked faster and faster.

Maurice, striding along beside her, was thinking of the irony of the "bouquet" she had thrown at him, and the innocence of that "Tell Eleanor"! "What a child she is still! And she's not in love with Johnny—" He didn't understand his exhilaration when he said that, but, except when he reproached her for tearing ahead, it kept him silent...

Supper was ready when they got home, so Edith had no chance to be solitary, and after supper Johnny Bennett dropped in. When he took his reluctant departure ("Confound him!" Maurice thought, impatiently, "he has on his sitting breeches to-night!") Maurice told Edith to come into the garden with him, and listen to the evening primroses; "They 'blossom with a silken burst of sound'—they do!" he insisted, for she jeered at the word "listen."

"They don't!" she said, and ran down the steps, flitting ahead of him in the dusk like a white moth. In their preoccupation, they neither of them looked at Eleanor; sitting silently on the porch between Mr. and Mrs. Houghton. They went, between the box hedges, to the primrose border, and Maurice quoted:

"Silent they stood. Hand clasped in hand, in breathless hush around! And saw her shyly doff her soft green hood, And blossom—with a silken burst of sound!

"Let's clasp hands," Maurice suggested.

"No, thank you," said Edith. And so they watched and listened. A tightly twisted bud loosened half a petal—then another half—and another—until it was all a shimmering whorl of petals, each caught at one side to the honeyed crosspiece of the pistil; then: "There!" said Maurice. "Did you hear it?"—all the silken disks were loose, and the flower cup, silver-gilt, spilled its fragrance into the stillness!

"It was the dream of a sound," she admitted

Her voice was a dream sound, too, he thought; a wordless tenderness for her flooded his mind, as the perfume of the primroses flooded the night. It seemed as if the lovely ignorance of her was itself a perfume! "'Tell Eleanor'! She doesn't know the wickedness of the world, and I don't want her to." He put his hand on her shoulder in the old, brotherly way—but drew it back as if something had burned him! That recoil should have revealed things to him, but it didn't. So far as his own consciousness went, he was too intent on what he called "the square deal" for Eleanor, to know what had happened to him; all he knew was that Edith, all of a sudden, was grown up! Her childishness was gone. He mustn't even put his hand on her shoulder! He had an uneasy moment of wondering—"Girls are so darned knowing, nowadays!"—whether she might be suspicious as to what that secret was, which she had advised him to "tell Eleanor"? But that was only for a moment; "Edith's not that kind of a girl. And, anyway, she'd never think of such a thing of me—which makes me all the more rotten!" So he clutched at Edith's undeserved faith in him, and said, "She'll never think of that." Still, she was grown up ... and he mustn't touch her. (This was one of the times when he was not worrying about Jacky!)

Edith, talking animatedly of primroses, had her absorbing thoughts, too; they were nothing but furious denial! "Maurice—horrid? Never!" Then, on the very breath of "Never," came again the insistent reminder: "But he could tell me anything, except—" So, thinking of just one thing, and talking of many other things, she walked up and down the primrose path with Maurice. They neither of them wanted to go back to the three older people: the father and mother—and wife.

Eleanor, on the porch, strained her eyes into the dusk; now and then she caught a glimmer of the dim whiteness of Edith's skirt, or heard Maurice's voice. She was suffering so that by and by she said, briefly, to her hosts—her trembling with unshed tears—"Good night," and went upstairs, alone—an old, crying woman. Eleanor had been unreasonable many times; but this time she was not unreasonable! That night anyone could have seen that she was, to Maurice, as nonexistent as any other elderly woman might have been. The Houghtons saw it, and when she went into the house Mary Houghton said, with distress:

"She suffers!"

Her husband nodded, and said he wished he was asleep. "Why," he demanded, "are women greater fools about this business than men? Poor Maurice ventures to talk to Edith of 'shoes and ships and sealing wax,'—and Eleanor weeps! Why are there more jealous women than men?"

"Because," Mary Houghton said, dryly, "more men give cause for jealousy than women."

"Touche! Touche!" he conceded; then added, quickly, "But Maurice isn't giving any cause."

"Well, I'm not so sure," she said.

Up in her own room, Eleanor, sitting in the dark by the open window, stared out into the leafy silence of the night. Once, down in the garden, Maurice laughed;—and she struck her clenched hand on her forehead:

"I can't bear it!" she said, gaspingly, aloud; "I can't bear it—she interests him!" His pleasure in Edith's mind was a more scorching pain to her than the thought of Lily's body....

Later, when Maurice and Edith came up from the garden darkness, they found a deserted porch. "Let's talk," he said, eagerly.

Edith shook her head. "Too sleepy," she said, and ran upstairs. He called after her, "Quitter!" But it provoked no retort, and he would have gone back to walk up and down alone, by the primroses, and worry over Jacky's future, if a melancholy voice had not come from the window of their room: "Maurice.... It's twelve o'clock." And he followed Edith indoors....

Edith had been sharply anxious to be by herself. She could not sit on the porch with Maurice, and not burst out and tell him—what? Tell him that nothing he had done could make the slightest difference to her! "He has probably met some awfully nice girl and likes her—a good deal. As for there being anything wrong, I don't believe it! That would be horrible. I'm a beast to have thought of such a thing!" She decided to put it out of her mind, and went to her desk, saying, "I'll straighten out my accounts."

She began, resolutely; added up one column, and subtracted the total from another; said: "Gosh! I'm out thirty dollars!" nibbled the end of her pen, and reflected that she would have to work on her father's sympathies;—then, suddenly, her pen still in her hand, she sat motionless.

"Even if there was anything—bad, I'd forgive him. He's a lamb!" But as she spoke, childishness fell away—she was a deeply distressed woman. Maurice was suffering. And she knew, in spite of her assertions to the contrary, that it wasn't because of any slight thing; any "crush" on a girl—nice or otherwise! He was suffering because he had done wrong—and she couldn't tear downstairs and say: "Maurice, never mind! I love you just as much; I don't care what you've done!" Why couldn't she say that? Why couldn't she go now, and sit on the porch steps beside him, and say—anything? She got up and began to walk about the room; her heart was beating smotheringly. "Why shouldn't I tell him I love him so that I'd forgive—anything? He knows I've always loved him!—next to father and mother. Why can't I tell him so, now?" Then something in her breast, beating like wings, made her know why she couldn't tell him!

"I love him; that's why."

After a while she said: "There's nothing wrong in it. I have a right to love him! He'll never know. How funny that I never knew—until to-night! Yet I've felt this way for ever so long. I think since that time at Fern Hill, when he was so bothered and wouldn't tell me what was the matter." Yes; it was strange that now, when some stabbing instinct had made her know that Maurice was not her "perfec' gentil knight," that same instinct should make her know that she loved him!... Not with the old love; not with the love that could overflow into words, the love that had kissed him when he had been "bothered"! "I can never kiss him again," she thought. She did not love him, now, "next to father and mother—dear darlings!" And when she said that, Edith knew that the "darlings" were of her past. "I love them next to Maurice," she thought, smiling faintly. "Well, he will never know it! Nobody will ever know it.... I'll just keep on loving him as long as I live." She had no doubt about that; and she did not drop into the self-consciousness of saying, "I am wronging Eleanor." That, to Edith, would not have been sense. She knew that she was not "wronging" anyone. As for the unknown girl, who, perhaps, had "wronged" Eleanor, and about whom, now, Maurice was so ashamed and so repentant—she was of no consequence anyhow. "Of course she is bad," Edith thought, "and the whole thing was her fault!" But it was in the past; he had said so. "He said it was long ago. If," she thought, "he did run crooked, why, I'm sorry for poor Eleanor; and he ought to tell her; there's no question about that! It's wrong not to tell her. And of course he couldn't tell me. That wouldn't be square to Eleanor!... But I hate to have him so unhappy.... No; it's right for him to be unhappy. He ought to be! It would be dreadful if he wasn't. But, somehow, the thing itself doesn't seem to touch me. I love him. I am going to love him all I want to! But no one will ever know it."

By and by she knelt down and prayed, just one word: "Maurice." She was not unhappy.



CHAPTER XXVI

During the next two days at Green Hill, Eleanor's dislike of Edith had no chance to break into silent flames, for the girl was so quiet that not even Eleanor could see anything in her behavior to Maurice to criticize. It was Maurice who did the criticizing!

"Edith, come down into the garden; I want to read something to you."

"Can't. Have to write letters."

"Edith, if you'll come into the studio I'll play you something I've patched up."

"I'm a heathen about music. Let's sit with Eleanor."

"Skeezics, what's the matter with you? Why won't you come and walk? You're getting lazy in your old age!"

"Busy," Edith said, vaguely.

At this point Maurice insisted, and Edith sneaked out to the back entry and telephoned Johnny Bennett: "Come over, lazybones, and take some exercise!"

John came, with leaps and bounds, so to speak, and Maurice said, grumpily:

"What do you lug Johnny in for?"

So, during the rest of her visit (with John Bennett as Maurice's chaperon!) Eleanor merely ached with dislike of Edith; but, even so, she had the small relief of not having to say to herself: "Is he seeing Mrs. Dale, now? ... Did he go to her house yesterday?" Of course, as soon as she went back to Mercer those silent questions began again; and her audible question nagged Maurice whenever he was in the house: "Did you go to the theater last night? ... Yes? Did you go alone? ... Will you be home to-night to dinner? ... No? Where are you going?"

Maurice, answering with bored patience, thought, with tender amusement, of Edith's advice, "Tell Eleanor." How little she knew!

He did not see Edith very often that next winter, "which is just as well," he thought. But his analysis stopped there; he did not ask himself why it was just as well. She made flying visits to Mercer, for shopping or luncheons, so he had glimpses of her, and whenever he saw her he was conscious of a little wistful change in her, for she was shy with him—Edith, shy!—and much gentler. When they discussed the Eternities or the ball game, she never pounded his arm with an energetic and dissenting fist, nor was there ever the faintest suggestion of the sexless "rough-house" of their old jokes! As for coming to town, she explained that she was too busy; she had taken the burden of housekeeping from her mother, and she was doing a good deal of hard reading preparatory to a course of technical training in domestic science, to which she was looking forward when she could find time for it. But whenever she did come to Mercer, she did her duty by rushing in to see Eleanor! Eleanor's criticisms of her, when she rushed out again, always made Maurice silently, but deeply, irritated. The criticisms lessened in the fall, because Eleanor had the pitiful preoccupation of watching poor Don O'Brien fade out of the world; and when he had gone she had to push her own misery aside while his grandmother's heart broke into the meager tears of age upon her "Miss Eleanor's" breast. But, besides that, she did not have the opportunity to criticize Edith, for the Houghtons went abroad.

So the rest of that year went dully by. To Eleanor, it was a time of spasmodic effort to regain Maurice's love; spasmodic, because when she had visions—hideous visions! of Maurice and the "other woman,"—then, her aspirations to regain his love, which had been born in that agony of recognized complicity in his faithlessness, would shrivel up in the vehement flame of jealousy. To Maurice, it was a time of endurance; of vague thoughts of Edith, but of no mental disloyalty to his wife. Its only brightness lay in those rare visits to Medfield, when Jacky looked at him like a worshiping puppy, and asked forty thousand questions which he couldn't answer! They were very careful visits, made only when Maurice was sure Eleanor would not be going to "look for a cook." He always balanced his brief pleasure of an hour with his little boy by an added gentleness to his wife—perhaps a bunch of violets, bought at the florist's on Maple Street where Lily got her flower pots or her bulbs. He was very lonely, and increasingly bothered about Jacky. ... "Lily will let him go plumb to hell. But I put him on the toboggan! ... I'm responsible for his existence," he used to think. And sometimes he repeated the words he had spoken that night when he had felt the first stir of fatherhood, "My little Jacky."

He would hardly have said he loved the child; love had come so gradually, that he had not recognized it! Yet it had come. It had been added to those other intimations of God, which also he had not recognized. Personal Joy on his wedding day had been the first; and the next had come when he looked up at the heights of Law among the stars, and then there had been the terrifying vision of the awfulness of Life, at Jacky's birth. Now, into his soul, arid with long untruth, came this flooding in of Love—which in itself is Life, and Joy, and the fulfilling of Law! Or, as he had said, once, carelessly, "Call it God."

This pursuing God, this inescapable God! was making him acutely uncomfortable now, about Jacky. Maurice felt the discomfort, but he did not recognize it as Salvation, or know Whose mercy sent it! He merely did what most of us do when we suffer: he gave the credit of his pain to the devil—not to Infinite Love. "Oh," the poor fellow thought, coming back one day from a call at the little secret house on Maple Street, "the devil's getting his money's worth out of me; well, I won't squeal about that! But he's getting his money's worth out of my boy, too. She's ruining him!"

He said this once when he had been rather recklessly daring in seeing "his boy." It was Saturday afternoon, and Jacky was free from his detested school. Maurice had given him a new sled, and then had "fallen," as he expressed it, to the little fellow's entreaty: "Mr. Curtis, if you'll come up to the hill, I'll show you how she'll go!" But before they started Maurice had a disagreeable five minutes with Lily. She had told him, tears of laughter running down her rosy cheeks, of some performance of Jacky's. He had asked her, she said, about his paw; "and I said his name was Mr. George Dale, and he died ten or eleven years ago of consumption—had to tell him something, you know! An' he says,—he's great on arithmetic,—'Poor paw!' he says, 'how many years was that before I was born?' I declare, I was all balled up!" Then, as she wiped her laughing eyes, she had grown suddenly angry: "I'm going to take him away from his new Sunday school; the teacher—it was her did the Paul Pry act, and asked him about his father;—well, I guess she ain't much of a lady; I never see her name in the Sunday papers;—she came down on Jacky because he told her a 'lie'; that's what she called it, 'a lie'! Said he'd go to hell if he told lies. I said, 'I won't have you threatening my child!' I declare I felt like saying, 'You go to hell yourself!' but of course I don't say things that ain't refined."

"Well, but Lily, the little beggar must tell the truth—"

"Mr. Curtis, Jacky didn't say anything but what you or me would say a dozen times a day. He just told her he hadn't a library book out, when he had. Seems he forgot to bring it back, so, 'course, he just said he hadn't any book. Well, this teacher, she put the lie onto him. It's a vulgar word, 'lie.' And as for hell, they say society people don't believe there is such a place any more."

When he and his little son walked away (Jacky dragging his magnificent sled), Maurice was nervously anxious to counteract such views.

"Jacobus," he said, "I'm going to tell you something: Big men never say anything that isn't so! Do you get on to that?" (In his own mind he added, "I'm a sweet person to tell him that!") "Promise me you'll never say anything that isn't just exactly so," said Maurice.

"Yes, sir," said Jacky. "Say, Mr. Curtis, have you got teeth you can take out?" When Maurice said, rather absently, that he had not, Jacky's dismay was pathetic. "Why, maw can do that," he said, reproachfully. It was the first flaw in his idol. It took several minutes to recover from the shock of disappointment; then he said: "Lookee here!" He paused beside a hydrant, and with his mittened hand broke off a long icicle, held it up and turned it about so that the sun flashed on it. "Handsome, ain't it?" he asked, timidly.

Maurice said yes, it was "handsome";—"but suppose you say 'isn't it' instead of 'ain't it.' 'Ain't' is not a nice word. And remember what I told you about telling the truth."

"Yes, sir," said Jacky, and trudged along, pulling his sled with one hand and carrying his icicle in the other.

After this paternal effort, Maurice stood in the snow watching the crowd of children—red-cheeked, shrill-voiced—sliding down Winpole Hill and yelling and snow-balling each other as they pulled their sleds up to the top of the slope again. It was during one of these panting tugs uphill, that Jacky saw fit to slap a fellow coaster, a little, snub-nosed girl with a sniffling cold in her head, and all muffled up in dirty scarves. Instantly Maurice, striding in among the children, took his son by the arm, and said, sharply:

"Young man, apologize! Quick! Or I'll take you home!"

Jacky gaped. "Pol'gize?"

"Say you're sorry! Out with it. Tell the little girl you're sorry you hit her."

"But I ain't," Jacky explained, anxiously; "an' you said I mustn't say what ain't so."

"Well, tell her you won't do it again," Maurice commanded, evading, as perplexed fathers must, moral contradictions.

Jacky, bewildered, said to his howling playmate, "I don't like you, but I won't hit you again, less I have to; then I'll lick the tar out of you!" He paused, rummaged in his pocket, produced a horrid precious little gray lump of something, and handed it to her. "Gum," he said, briefly.

Maurice, taking another step into paternal wisdom, was deaf to the statute of limitation in the apology; but walking home with the little boy, he said to himself, "She's ruining him!" and fell into such moody silence that he didn't even notice Jacky's obedient struggles with "isn't." Once, a week later, as a result of this experience, he tried to make some ethical suggestions to Lily. She was displaying her latest triumph—a rosebush, blossoming in February! And Maurice, duly admiring the glowing flower, against its background of soot-speckled snowdrift on the window sill, began upon Jacky's morals. Lily's good-humored face hardened.

"Mr. Curtis, you don't need to worry about Jacky! He don't steal, and he don't swear,—much; and he's never been pinched, and he's awful handsome; and, my God! what more do you want? I ain't going to make his life miserable by tellin' him to talk grammar, or do the polite act!"

"Lily, I only mean I want him to turn out well, and he won't unless he tells the truth—"

"He'll turn out good. You needn't worry. Anybody's got to have sense about telling the truth; you can't just plunk everything out! I—I believe I'll go and live in New York."

Instantly Maurice was silenced. "She mustn't take him away!" he thought, despairingly.

His fear that she would do so was a constant worry.... His work in the Weston real-estate office involved occasional business trips of a few days, and his long hours on trains were filled with this increasing anxiety about Jacky. "If she takes him away from Mercer, and I can't ever see him, nothing can save him! But, damn it! what can I do?" he would say. He tried to reassure himself by counting up Lily's good points; her present uprightness; her honest friendliness to him; her almost insane devotion to Jacky, and her pathetic aspiration for respectability, which was summed up in that one word of collective emptiness,—"Society." But immediately her bad points clamored in his mind; her ignorance and unmorality and vulgarity. "Truth is just a matter of expediency with her. If he gets to be a liar, I'll boot him!" Maurice would think of these bad points until he got perfectly frantic! His sense of wanting advice was like an ache in his mind—for there was no one who could advise him. Then, quite unexpectedly, advice came....

In the fall the Houghtons got back from Europe. Maurice saw them only between trains in Mercer, for Henry Houghton was in a great hurry to get up to Green Hill, and Edith, too, was exercised about her trunks and the unpacking of her treasures of reminiscence. But Mrs. Houghton said: "We shall be coming down to do some shopping before Christmas. No! We'll not inflict ourselves upon Eleanor! We'll go to the hotel; you will both take dinner with us."

They came, and Maurice and Eleanor dined with them, as Mrs. Houghton had insisted that they should; but only Mrs. Houghton accepted Eleanor's repaying hospitality.

"Mother has virtue enough for the family," Edith said; "I'm going to stay here with father."

"It will be a jewel in your crown," Henry Houghton told his Mary.

"Why not collect jewels for your crown?" she inquired. "Henry, Maurice looks troubled. What do you suppose is the matter?"

"He does look seedy," he agreed; "poke about and find out what's wrong. You can do it better if your inelegant offspring isn't around, and if I'm not there, either. He won't open his lips to me! I think it's money. He's carrying a pretty heavy load. But he never peeps.... I wish he wouldn't economize on cigars, though; he offered me one yesterday, and politeness compelled me to smoke it!"

"'Peeps'!" said Edith; "how elegant!"

So that was how it happened that Mary Houghton went alone to dine with Maurice and Eleanor. But she couldn't discover, in Maurice's talk or Eleanor's silences, any hint of financial anxiety. "So," she said to herself, "it isn't money that worries him." When he walked back with her to the hotel after dinner, he was thinking, "She'd know what to do about Jacky." But of course he couldn't ask her what to do! He could never ask anybody—except, perhaps, Mr. Houghton; and what would he, an old man, know about bringing up a little boy? He was listening, not very closely, to Mrs. Houghton's talk of the Custom House; but when she said, "John Bennett met us on the dock," he was suddenly attentive.