She had just one purpose—to get warm! But she was so dazed that she could never remember how she reached Mrs. Newbolt's; probably she walked, for there were no cabs in that part of town and no car line passed Mrs. Newbolt's door. The time after she left Mrs. O'Brien's was a blank. Even when she had swallowed the hot whisky, and began to feel warmer, she was still mentally benumbed, and couldn't remember what she had done. She did not notice Johnny Bennett; she saw Edith, but did not, apparently, understand that she was staying in the house. When the doctor came she was as silent to him as to everybody else.

He asked no questions. "Keep her warm," he said, "and don't talk to her."

Mrs. Newbolt, going to the door with him, palpitating with fright, said, "We don't know a thing more about what's happened than you do! She just appeared, drippin', wet!"

"She has evidently fallen into some water," he said; "but I wouldn't ask her about it, yet. Of course we don't know what the result will be, Mrs. Newbolt. I can't help saying I'm anxious. Mr. Curtis had better be sent for. Telegraph him in the morning." He went off, thinking to himself, "She must have gone into the country to do it. If she'd tried the river, here, and scrambled out, she wouldn't have been so frightfully chilled. I wonder what's up?"

Everybody wondered what was up, but Eleanor did not enlighten them; so the three interrupted revelers could do nothing but think. Johnny's thoughts, as he sat down in the parlor among the Welsh-rabbit plates, keeping the fire up, and waiting in case he might be needed, were even briefer than the doctor's: "Tried to commit suicide."

Edith, standing in the upper hall, listening to Mrs. Newbolt at Eleanor's bedside, exclaiming, and repeating her dear mother's ideas about catching cold, and offering more hot-water bottles, had her thoughts: "I won't go into the room—she would hate to see me! The doctor said she had fallen into some water. Did she—do it on purpose? Oh, was it my fault?" Edith's heart pounded with terror: "Was it what I said to her in the garden that made her do it?"

Mrs. Newbolt, in a blue-flannel dressing gown, and in and out of the spare room with sibilant whispers of anxiety, had, for once, more thoughts than words; her words were only, "I've always expected it!" But her thoughts would have filled volumes! Mrs. Newbolt had put her hair in order for the night, and now her crimping pins made the shadow of her head, bobbing on the ceiling, look like a gigantic spider.

Eleanor had just one hazy thought: "I tried ... I tried—and I failed."

Other people, however, didn't feel so sure that she had failed. She "looks like death," Mrs. Newbolt told Edith the next morning. "We've got to find Maurice! Edith, why do you suppose she—did it?"

"Oh, but she didn't!" Edith said. "What sense would there be—"

"Don't talk about 'sense'! Eleanor never had any. I've telegraphed your mother to come. I wonder how Bingo is? She understands her. The ashman has broken my new ash barrel; I don't know what this country is comin' to!"

Then she went upstairs to try to understand Eleanor herself. "Eleanor, what happened?"

"Nothing. I'm going home this afternoon."

"Indeed you are not! You're not goin' out of this house till Maurice comes and gets you! What happened?" she demanded again.

"I fell. Into some water."

"How could you 'fall'? And what 'water'?"

"I had gone out to the river—up in Medfield. To—take a walk; and I ... slipped...."

"Now, Eleanor, look here; if I have a virtue, it's candor, and I'll tell you why; it saves time. That's what my dear father used to say: 'Lyin' wastes time.' I know what you tried to do; and it was very wicked."

"But I didn't do it!"

"You tried to. If you and Maurice have quarreled, I'll stand by you."

Eleanor covered her face with her hands—and Mrs. Newbolt burst out, "He's treated you badly! You needn't try to deceive me,—he's been flirtin' with some woman?" Her pale, prominent eyes snapped with anger.

"Oh, Auntie, don't! He hasn't! Only, I—wanted to make him happier; and so I—" She broke into furious crying. Despairing crying.

Instantly Mrs. Newbolt was all frightened solicitude. "There! Don't cry! Have a hot-water bag. They say there's a new kind on the market. I must get a new pair of rubbers. Your face is awfully bruised. He's puffectly happy! He worships the ground you walk on! Eleanor, don't cry. How's your cold? The ashman—"

Eleanor, gasping, said her cold was better, and repeated her determination of going home.

It was the doctor—dropping in, he said, to make sure Mrs. Curtis was none the worse for her "accident"—who put a stop to that.

"I slipped and fell," Eleanor told him; she was very hoarse.

He said yes, he understood. "But you got badly chilled, and you had a cold to start with. So you must lie low for two or three days. When will Mr. Curtis be back?"

Eleanor said she didn't know; all she knew was she didn't want him sent for. She was "all right."

But of course he had been sent for! "I don't know that it was really necessary," Mrs. Newbolt told Mrs. Houghton, who appeared late in the afternoon; "but I wasn't goin' to take the responsibility—"

"Of course not!" Mrs. Houghton said. "Mr. Weston has telegraphed him, too, I hope?" Then, before taking her things off, she went upstairs to Eleanor. "Well!" she said, "I hear you had an accident? Sensible girl, to stay in bed!" She took Eleanor's hand, and its hot tremor made her look keenly at the haggard face on the pillow.

"Oh," Eleanor said, with a gasp of relief, "I'm so glad you're here! There are some things I want attended to. I owe—I mean, somebody paid my car fare. And I must send it to her! And then I want something from my desk; but I can't have Bridget get it, and I don't want to ask Auntie to. It's—it's a letter to Maurice. I wanted to tell him something.... But I've changed my mind. I don't want him to see it. He mustn't see it! Oh, Mrs. Houghton, would you get it for me? I'd be so grateful! ... And then,—oh, that five cents! I don't know how I'm going to send it to her—"

"Tell me who it is, and I'll get it to her; and I'll get the letter," Mary Houghton told her; and went on with the usual sick-room encouragement: "The doctor says you are better. But you must hurry and get well, so as to help Maurice with the little boy!"

Her words were like a push against some tottering barrier.

"I tried to help him; I tried to get Jacky! I went to the woman's, but she wouldn't give him to me! I tried—so hard. But she wouldn't! She paid my car fare—"

Mrs. Houghton bent over and kissed her: "Tell me about it, dear; perhaps I can help."

"There is no help! ... She won't give him up. She insisted on coming home with me, and she paid my car fare! Then I thought, if—I were not alive, Maurice could get him, because he could marry her ..."

Instantly, with a thrill of horror and admiration, Mrs. Houghton understood the "accident"! "Eleanor! What a mad, mad thought! As if you could help Maurice by giving him a great grief! Oh, I do thank God he has been spared anything so terrible!"

"But," Eleanor said, excitedly, "if I were dead, it would be his duty to marry her, wouldn't it? Jacky is his child! Oughtn't he to marry Jacky's mother? Oh, Mrs. Houghton, I owe her five cents—"

The older woman was trembling, but she spoke calmly: "Eleanor, dear, you must live for Maurice, not—die for him."

"Promise me," said Eleanor, "you won't tell him?"

"Of course I won't!" said Mrs. Houghton, with elaborate cheerfulness. She kissed her, and went downstairs, feeling very queer in her knees. She paused at the parlor door to say to Mrs. Newbolt and Edith that she was going out to do an errand for Eleanor; "I hope Maurice will get back soon," she said. "I don't like Eleanor's looks." Then she went to get that letter which Maurice "must not see." As she walked along the street she was still tingling with the shock of having her own theories brought home to her. "Thank God," Mary Houghton said, "that nothing happened!"

The maid who opened the door at Maurice's house was evidently excited, but not about her mistress. "Oh, Mrs. Houghton!" she said, "we done our best, but he wouldn't take a bite!—and I declare I don't know what Mrs. Curtis will say. He just wouldn't eat, and this morning he up and died—and me offering him a chop!" Bridget wept with real distress. "Mrs. Houghton, please tell her we done our best; he just smelled his chop—and died. You see, he hasn't eat a thing, without she gave it to him, for—oh, more 'n a month!"

Mary Houghton went into the library, where the fire was out, and the dust on tables and chairs bore witness to the fact that Bridget had devoted herself to Bingo; the room was gloomy, and smelled of soot. Little Bingo lay, stiff and chill, on the sofa; on a plate beside him was a chop rimmed in cold grease,—poor little, loving, jealous, old Bingo! "I hope it won't upset Mrs. Curtis," Mrs. Houghton told the maid; then gave directions about the stark little body. She found the letter in Eleanor's desk, and went back to Mrs. Newbolt's. "Love," she thought, "is as strong as death; stronger! Bingo—and Eleanor."



CHAPTER XXXV

Maurice, followed by telegrams that never quite overtook him, did, some forty-eight hours later, get the news that Eleanor had "had an accident," and was at Mrs. Newbolt's, who thought he had "better return immediately." His business was not quite finished, but it did not need Mr. Weston's laconic wire, "Drop Greenleaf matters and come back," to start him on the next train for Mercer. He had been away nearly two weeks—two terrible weeks, of facing himself; two weeks of rebellion, and submission; of tumultuous despair and quiet acceptance. He had looked faithfully—and very shrewdly—into the "Greenleaf matters"; he had turned one or two sharp corners, with entirely honest cleverness, and he was taking back to Mercer some concessions which old Weston had slipped up on! Yes, he had done a darned good job, he told himself, lounging in the smoking compartment of one parlor car or another, or strolling up and down station platforms for a breath of air. And all the while that he was on the Greenleaf job—in Pullmans, sitting in hotel lobbies writing letters, looking through title and probate records—his own affairs raced and raged in his thoughts; they were summed up in one word: "Edith." He could not get away from Edith! He tripped a Greenleaf trustee into an admission (and he thought, "so long as she never suspects that I love her, there's no harm in going along as we always have"). Then he conceded a point to the Greenleaf interests (and said to himself, "her hair on her shoulders that day on the lawn was like a nimbus around the head of a saint. How she'd hate that word 'saint'!"). His chuckle made one of the Greenleaf heirs think that Weston's representative was a good sort;—"pleasant fellow!" But Maurice, looking "pleasant," was thinking: "I'd about sell my soul to kiss her hair ... Oh, I must stop this kind of thing! I swear it's worse than the Lily and Jacky business...." Then he signed a deed, and the Greenleaf people felt they had made a good thing of it—but Maurice's telegram that the deed was signed, caused rejoicing in the Weston office! "Curtis got ahead of 'em!" said Mr. Weston. While he was writing that triumphant telegram Maurice was wondering: "Was John Bennett a complete idiot? ... If things had been different would Edith have ... cared?" For himself, he, personally, didn't care "a damn," whether Weston got ahead of Greenleaf or Greenleaf beat Weston. His own affairs engrossed him: "my job," he was telling himself, "is to see that Eleanor doesn't suffer any more, poor girl! And Edith shall never know. And I'll make a decent man of Jacky—not a fool, like his father." So he wrote his victorious dispatch, and the Weston office congratulated itself.

Maurice had been very grateful for his fortnight of absence from everybody, except the Greenleaf heirs; grateful for a solitude of trains and lawyers' offices. Because, in solitude, he could, with entirely hopeless courage, face the future. He was facing it unswervingly the day he reached Chicago, where he was to get some final signatures; he came into the warm lobby of the hotel, glad to escape the rampaging lake wind, and while he was registering the hotel clerk produced the telegrams which had been held for him. The first, from Mr. Weston, "Drop Greenleaf," bewildered him until he read the other, "Eleanor has had an accident." Then he ran his pen through his name, asked for a time-table, and sent a peremptory wire to Mrs. Newbolt saying that he was on his way home, and asking that full particulars be telegraphed to him at a certain point on his journey. "Let me know just what happened, and how she is," he telegraphed. "It must be serious," he thought, "to send for me!"

It was hardly an hour before he was on a train for another day of travel, during which he experienced the irritation common to all of us when we receive an alarming dispatch, devoid of details. "Economizing on ten cents! What kind of an 'accident'? How serious is it? When was it? Why didn't they let me know before?" and so on; all the futile, anxious, angry questions which a man asks himself under such circumstances. But suddenly, while he was asking these questions, another question whispered in his mind; a question to which he would not listen, and which he refused to answer; but again and again, over and over, it repeated itself, coming, it seemed, on the rhythmical roll of the wheels—the wheels which were taking him back to Eleanor! "If—if—if—" the wheels hammered out; "if anything happens to Eleanor—"? He never finished that sentence, but the beginning of it actually frightened him. "Am I as low as this?" he said, frantically, "speculating on the possibility of anything happening to her?" But he was not so low as that—he only heard the jar of the wheels: "If—if—if—if—"

When he reached the station to which he had told Mrs. Newbolt to reply, he rushed out of the car into the telegraph office, and clutched at the message before the operator could put it into its flimsy brown envelope; as he read it he said under his breath, "Thank God!" It was from Mary Houghton:

Accident slight. Slipped into water. All right now except bad cold.

Maurice's hand shook as he folded the message and stuffed it into his pocket. He had the sense of having escaped from a terror—the terror of intolerable remorse. For if she had not been "all right," if, instead of just "a bad cold," the dispatch had said "something had happened"!—then, for all the rest of his life he would have had to remember how the wheels had beaten out that terrible refrain: "If—if—if—"

So he said, "Thank God."

All that day, while Maurice was hurrying back to Mercer, Eleanor lay very still, and when Mrs. Newbolt or Mrs. Houghton came into the room she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Edith did not come into the room; so, in a hazy way, Eleanor took it for granted that she had left the house. "I should think she would!" Eleanor thought; "she could hardly have the face to stay in the same house with me." But she did not think much about Edith; she was absorbed in deciding what she should say to Maurice. Should she tell him the truth?—or some silly story of a walk to their meadow? The two alternatives flew back and forth in her mind like shuttlecocks. There was one thing she felt sure of: that letter—which Mrs. Houghton had brought from her desk, which Maurice was to have read when she had done what she set out to do, but which now she kept clutched in her hand, or hidden under her pillow—Maurice must not see that letter! If he read it, now, while she was (she told herself) still half sick from those drenched hours of the trolley ride and the dark wanderings from Mrs. O'Brien's to Mrs. Newbolt's, the whole thing would seem simply ridiculous. Some time, he must know that she loved him enough to buy Jacky for him, by dying—or trying to die! She would tell him, some time; because her purpose (even if it had failed) would measure the heights and depths of her love as nothing else could; but he must not know it now, because she hadn't carried it out. That first night, when she had found herself safe and warm (oh, warm! She had thought she never would be warm any more!)—when she had found herself in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room in the four-poster with its chintz hangings and its great soft pillows, she had been glad she had not carried it out. Glad not to be dead. As she lay there, shivering slowly into delicious comfort, and fending off Mrs. Newbolt's distracted questions, she had had occasional moments of a sense of danger escaped; perhaps it would have been wrong to—to lie down there in the river? People call it wicked Mrs. Newbolt, for a single suspicious instant ("She forgot it right off," Eleanor said; "she just thought we'd quarreled!"); but Mrs. Newbolt had said it was "wicked." "But I didn't do it!" Eleanor told herself in a rush of gratitude. She hadn't been "wicked"! Instead, she was in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room, looking dreamily at the old French clock on the mantelpiece, whose tarnished gilt face glimmered between two slender black-marble columns; sometimes she counted the tick-tock of the slowly swinging pendulum; sometimes, toward dawn, she watched the foggy yellow daylight peer between the red rep curtains; but counting, and looking, and drowsing, she was glad to be alive. It was not until the next afternoon that she began to be faintly mortified at being alive. It was then that she had felt that she must get that letter—Maurice mustn't see it! Little by little, humiliation at her failure to be heroic, grew acute. Maurice wouldn't know that she loved him enough to give him Jacky; he would just know that she was silly. She had got wet; and had a cold in her head. Snuffles—not Death. He might—laugh!... It was then that she implored Mrs. Houghton to get the letter out of her desk.

Yet when it was given to her she held it in her hand under the bedclothes, saying to herself that she would not destroy it, yet, because, even though she had failed, there might come a time when it would prove to Maurice how much she loved him. She was so absorbed in this thought that she did not grieve much for Bingo. "Poor little Bingo," she said, vaguely, when Mrs. Houghton told her that the little dog was dead; "he was so jealous." Now, with Maurice coming nearer every hour, she could not think of Bingo; she was face to face with a decision! What should she tell him about the "accident"?

It was in the afternoon of the day that Maurice was to arrive,—he had telegraphed that he would reach Mercer in the evening;—that she had a sudden panic about Edith. "She was here that night and saw me. I know she laughed at me because I hadn't any hat on! She may—suspect? If she does, she'll tell him! What shall I do to stop her?" She couldn't think of any way to stop her! She couldn't hold her thoughts steady enough to reach a decision. First would come gladness of her own comfort and safety, and the warm, warm bed; then shame, that she had faltered and run away from a chance to do a great thing for Maurice; then terror that Edith would make her ridiculous to Maurice. Then all these thoughts would whirl about, run backward: First, terror of Edith! then shame! then comfort! Suddenly the terror thought held fast with a question. "Suppose I make her promise not to tell Maurice anything? I think she would keep a promise...." It would be dreadful to ask the favor of secrecy of Edith—just as she had asked the same sort of favor of Lily—but to seem silly to Maurice would be more dreadful than to ask a favor! She held to this purpose of humiliating self-protection, long enough to ask Mrs. Houghton when Edith was coming down from Green Hill.

"Why, she's here, now, in the house!" Edith's mother said.

"Here?" Eleanor said, despairingly. If Edith was here, then Maurice, when he came, would see her and she would tell him! "She would make a funny story of it," Eleanor thought; "I know her! She would make him laugh. I can't bear it! ... I would like to speak to Edith," she told Mrs. Houghton, faintly.

Edith, summoned by her mother, stood for a rigid moment outside Eleanor's door, trying to get herself in hand. In these anxious days, Edith's youth had been threatened by assailing waves of a remorse that at times would have engulfed it altogether, but for that unflinching reasonableness which made her the girl she was. "It may be," Edith had said to herself; "it may be that what I said to her in the garden made her so angry that she tried to kill herself; but why should it have made her angry? I didn't injure her. Besides, she dragged it out of me! I couldn't lie. She said, 'You love him.' I would not lie, and say I didn't! But what harm did it do her?" So she reasoned; but reason did not keep her from suffering. "Did I drive her to it?" Edith said, over and over. So when her mother told her Eleanor wanted to speak to her, she grew a little pale. When she entered Eleanor's room her heart was beating so hard she felt smothered, but she was perfectly matter of fact. "Anything I can do for you, Eleanor?" she said. She stood at the foot of the bed, holding on to the carved bed post.

Eleanor looked at her for a silent moment, then gathered herself together. "Edith," she said (she was very hoarse and spoke with difficulty), "I don't want to bother Maurice about—about my accident. So I am going to ask you, please, not to refer to it to him. Not to tell him anything about it. Anything. Promise me."

"Of course I won't!" Edith said. As she spoke she forgot herself in pity for the scared, haggard face. ("Oh, was it my fault?" she thought, with a real pang.) And before she knew it her coldness was all gone and she was at Eleanor's side; she sat down on the edge of the bed and caught her hand impulsively. "Eleanor," she said, "I've been awfully unhappy, for fear anything I said—that morning—troubled you? Of course there was no sense in talking that way, for either of us. So please forgive me! Was it what I said, that made you—that bothered you, I mean? I'm so unhappy," Edith said, and caught her lip between her teeth to keep it steady; her eyes were bright with tears. "Eleanor, truly I am nothing to—to anybody. Nobody cares a copper for me! Do be kind to me. Oh—I've been awfully unhappy; and I'm so glad you're better."

Instantly the smoldering fire broke into flame: "I'm not better," Eleanor said, "and you wouldn't be glad if I were."

It was as if she struck her hand upon those generous young lips. Edith sprang to her feet. "Eleanor!"

Eleanor sat up in bed, her hands behind her, propping her up; her cheeks were dully red, her eyes glowing. "All this talk about making me unhappy means nothing at all. You have always made me unhappy. And as for anybody's caring for you—they don't; you are quite right about that. Quite right! And I want to tell you something else: If anything happens to me, I want Maurice to marry again. But he won't marry you."

"Eleanor," Edith said, "you wouldn't say such a thing, or think such a thing, if you weren't sick. I'm sorry I came in. I'll go right away, and—"

"No," she said; "don't go away,"—her arms had begun to tremble with strain of supporting her, she spoke in whispered gasps: "I am going to speak," she said; "I prefer to speak. I want you to know that if I die—"

"You are not going to die! You are going to get well."

"Will you please not keep interrupting? It is so hard for me to get my breath. I want you to know that he will marry—that Dale woman. Because it is right that he should. Because of the little boy. His little boy."

Edith was dumb.

"So you see, he can't marry you," Eleanor said, and fell back on her pillows, her eyes half closed.

There was a long silence, just the ticking of the Empire clock and the faint snapping of the fire. Edith felt as if some iron hand had gripped her throat. For a moment it was impossible for her to speak; then the words came quietly: "Eleanor, I'm glad you told me this. You are going to get well, and I'm glad, glad that you are! But I must tell you: If anything had happened to you, I would have moved heaven and earth to have kept Maurice from marrying that woman. Oh, Eleanor, how can you say you love him, and yet plan such terrible unhappiness for him?"

She turned and ran out of the room, up another flight of stairs to her own bedroom. There she fell down on her bed and lay tense and rigid, her face hidden in her hands. This, then, was what Maurice had meant? She saw again the wood path, and the tall fern breaking under Maurice's racquet; she saw the flecks of sunshine on the moss—she heard him say he "hadn't played the game with Eleanor." Oh, he hadn't, he hadn't! Then she thought of the Dale woman. The accident on the river. The stumble at the gate and of Maurice's child in Lily's arms. "Oh, poor Eleanor! poor Eleanor! ... All the same, she is wicked, to be so cruel to him. She is taking her revenge. Jealousy has made her wicked. But, oh, I wish I hadn't hurt her in the garden! But how could Maurice—that little, common woman! How could he?" She shook with sobs: "Poor, poor Eleanor ..."

Eleanor, on her big bed, lay panting with anger and fright. "Now she'll know I'm hiding something from him!" she thought; "I've put myself in her power by having a secret with her; just as I put myself in Lily's power by asking her not to tell Maurice I had been there. Well, Edith is in my power!—because I've made her know he'll never care for her. And she'll keep her word; she'll not tell him about the river."

The relief of this was so great that she could almost forget her humiliation; she gave herself up to thinking what she herself must do to keep Maurice in ignorance. "Auntie will be sure to say something. But he knows how silly she is. She thought we'd quarreled, and that I had tried ... I might tell Maurice that? And he'll make fun of her, and won't believe anything she says! I might say that I went out to—to see our river, and slipped and got wet, and that Auntie thought we'd quarreled, and that I had ... had tried to ... to—And he'll say, 'What a joke!' But maybe he'll say, 'Why did you go out to Medfield so late?' And I'll say, 'Oh, well, I got delayed.' ... Yes, that's the thing to do."

So, around and around, her poor, frantic thoughts raced and trampled one another. When Mrs. Newbolt interrupted them with a tray and some supper, Eleanor, with eyes closed, motioned her away: "My head aches. I can't eat anything. I'm going to try and get a little sleep."

By and by, through sheer fatigue, she did drowse, and when the wheels of Maurice's cab grated against the curb, she was asleep.

Edith, upstairs in her own room, heard the front door close sharply. "I can't see him!" she said; "I mustn't see him." But she wanted to see him; she wanted to say to him: "Maurice, you can make it all up to Eleanor! You can make her happy. Don't despair about it—we'll all help you make it up to her!" She wanted to say: " Oh,Maurice, you will conquer. I know you will!" If she could only see him and tell him these things! "If I didn't love him, I could," she thought....

Maurice came hurrying into the parlor, with the anxious, "How is she?" on his lips; and Mrs. Newbolt and Mrs. Houghton were full of reassurances, and suggestions of food, which he negatived promptly. "Tell me about Eleanor! What happened?"

"She's asleep," Mrs. Newbolt said. "You must have something to eat—" She was in such a panic of uncertainty as to what must and must not be said to Maurice that she clutched at supper as a perfectly safe topic. "I—I—I'll go and see about your supper," said Mrs. Newbolt, and trundled off to hide herself in the dining room.

Mary Houghton could not hide, but she would have been glad to! "Eleanor is sleepy, now, Maurice," she said; "but she'll want to have just a glimpse of you—"

"I'll go right up!"

"Maurice, wait one minute. If I were you, I wouldn't get Eleanor to talking, to-night; she's a little feverish—"

"Mrs. Houghton!" he broke in, "Eleanor's all right, isn't she?" His face was furrowed with alarm. (If that wicked rhythm of the wheels should begin again!)

"Oh yes; I—I think so. She hasn't quite got over the shock yet, but—"

"What shock? Nobody's told me yet what it was! Your dispatch only said she'd slipped into the water. What water?"

"We don't really know," said Mrs. Houghton; "and she mustn't be worried with questions, the doctor says. You see, she got dripping wet, somehow, and then had a long trolley ride—and she had a cold to start with—"

"I'll just crawl upstairs, and see if she's awake," said Maurice. "I won't disturb her."

As he started softly upstairs, Mrs. Newbolt opened the dining-room door a crack, and peered in at Mary Houghton. "Did you tell him?" she said, in a wheezing whisper.

Mrs. Houghton shook her head.

"Well, I can tell you who won't tell him," said Eleanor's aunt; "me! To tell a man that his wife—"

"Hush-sh!" said Mrs. Houghton; "he's coming downstairs. Besides, we don't know that she did—"

The dining-room door closed softly on the whispered words: "Puffect nonsense. Of course we know."

Maurice, tiptoeing into Eleanor's room, thought she was asleep, and was backing out again, when she opened drowsy eyes and said, faintly, "Hullo."

He bent over to kiss her. "Well, you're a great girl, to cut up like this when I'm away from home!"

She smiled, closed her eyes, and he tiptoed out of the room....

Back again in the parlor, he began, "Mrs. Houghton, for Heaven's sake, tell me the whole thing!" He wasn't anxious now; as far as he could see, Eleanor was "all right"—just sleepy. But what on earth—

She told him what she knew; what she suspected, she kept to herself. But she might as well have told it all. For, as he listened, his face darkened with understanding.

"The river? In Medfield? But, why—?"

"Edith says you and she had a good deal of sentiment about the river, and—"

"At six o'clock, on a March evening?" said Maurice. He put his hands in his pockets and began to walk up and down. Mrs. Houghton had nothing more to say; the room was so silent that the dining-room door opened a furtive crack—then closed quickly! Mrs. Houghton began to talk about Maurice's journey, and Maurice asked whether Eleanor could be taken home the next day—at which the dining-room door opened broadly, and Mrs. Newbolt said:

"If you ask me, I'd say 'no'! If you want to know what I think, I think she's got a temperature! And she oughtn't to stir out of this house till it's normal."

"Mrs. Newbolt," said Maurice, pausing in his tramping up and down the room; "why did Eleanor go out to Medfield?"

"Perhaps she was lookin' for a cook! I—I think I'll go to bed!" said Mrs. Newbolt—and almost ran out of the room.

Maurice looked down at Mrs. Houghton, and laughed, grimly: "You might as well tell me?"

"My dear fellow, we have nothing to tell! We don't know anything—except that Eleanor has added to her cold, and is very nervous," She paused; could she give him an idea of the extent of Eleanor's "nervousness," and yet not tell him what they all felt sure of? "Why, Maurice," she said; "just to show you how hysterical Eleanor is, she told me—" Mrs. Houghton dropped her voice, and looked toward the dining-room door; but Mrs. Newbolt's ponderous step made itself heard overhead. "She said—Oh, Maurice, this is too foolish to repeat; but it just shows how Eleanor loves you. She implied that she didn't want to get well, so that you could—could get the little boy, by marrying his mother!"

Maurice sat down and stared at her, open-mouthed. "Marry? I, marry Lily?" He actually gasped under the impact of a perfectly new idea; then he said, very softly, "Good God."

Mrs. Houghton nodded. "Her one thought," she said (praying that, without breaking her word to Eleanor, and betraying what was so terribly Eleanor's own affair, she might make Maurice's heart so ready for the pathos that he would not be repelled by the folly), "her one desire is that you should have your little boy."

Maurice walked over to the fireplace and kicked two charred pieces of wood together between the fire irons. In the crash of Mary Houghton's calm words, the rhythm of the wheels was permanently silenced.

It was about four o'clock the next morning that the change came: Eleanor had a violent chill.

"I thought we were out of the woods," the doctor said, frowning; "but I guess I was too previous. There's a spot in the left lung, Mr. Curtis."



CHAPTER XXXVI

When Maurice saw his wife the next morning, it was with Mrs. Houghton's warning—emphasized by the presence of a nurse—that he must not excite her. So he sat at her bedside and told her about his trip, and how he had got ahead of the Greenleaf heirs, and how he rushed back to Mercer the minute those dispatches came saying that she was ill—and he never asked her why she was ill, or what took her out to the river in the cold dusk of that March afternoon. She didn't try to tell him. She was very warm and drowsy—and she held in her hand, under the bedclothes, that letter which proved how much she loved him, and which, some time, when she got well, she would show him. All that day the household outside her closed door was very much upset; but Eleanor, in the big bed, was perfectly placid. She lay mere watching the tarnished gilt pendulum swing between the black pillars of the clock on the mantelpiece, thinking—thinking. "You'll be all right to-morrow!" Maurice would say; and she would smile silently and go on thinking. "When I get well," she thought, "I will do—so and so." By and by, still with the letter clutched in her hot hand, she began to say to herself, "If I get well." She had ceased worrying over how she was going to explain the "accident" to Maurice; that "if" left a door open into eternal reticence. So, instead of worrying, she made plans for Jacky: "He must see a dentist," she told Maurice. On the third day she stopped saying, "If I get well," and thought, "When I die." She said it very tranquilly, "When I die Maurice must get him a bicycle." She thought of this happily, for dying meant that she had not failed. She would not be ridiculous to Maurice—she would be his wife, giving him a child—a son! So she lay with her eyes closed, thinking of the bicycle and many little, pleasant things; and with the old, slipping inexactness of mind she told herself that she had not "done anything wrong"; she had not drowned herself! She had just caught a bad cold. But she would die, and Maurice would love her for giving him Jacky. Toward evening, however, an uneasy thought came to her: if Maurice knew that, to give him Jacky, she had even tried to get drowned, it might distress him? She wished she hadn't written the letter! It would hurt him to see it.... Well, but he needn't see it! She held out the crumpled envelope. "Miss Ryan," she said to the nurse, huskily, "please burn this."

"Yes, indeed!" said Miss Ryan....

There was a burst of flame in the fireplace, and the little, pitiful letter, with its selfishness and pain and sacrifice, vanished—as Lily's handkerchief had vanished, and the braided ring of blossoming grass—all gone, as the sparks that fly upward. Nobody could ever know the scented humiliation of the handkerchief, or the agony of the faded ring, or the renouncing love which had written the poor foolish letter. Maurice wouldn't be pained. As for her gift to him of Jacky, she would just tell him she wanted him to marry Lily, so he could have his child.... And Edith? Oh, he would never think of Edith!

So she was very peaceful until, the next day, she heard Edith's voice in the hall, then she frowned. "She's here! In the house with him! Don't let her come in," she told Maurice; "she takes my breath." But, somehow, she couldn't help thinking of Edith.... "That morning in the garden she cried," Eleanor thought. It was strange to think of tears in those clear, careless eyes. "I never supposed she could cry. I've cried a good deal. Men don't like tears." And there had been tears in Edith's eyes when she came in and sat on the bed and said she was "unhappy...." "She believed," Eleanor meditated, her own eyes closed, "that it was because of her that I went out to the river." She was faintly sorry that Edith should reproach herself. "I didn't do it because she made me angry; I did it to make Maurice happy. I almost wish she knew that." Perhaps it was this vague regret that made her remember Edith's assertion that she would do "anything on earth" to keep Maurice from marrying Lily. "But that's the only way he can be sure of getting Jacky," Eleanor argued to herself, her mind clearing into helpless perplexity—"and it's the only way to keep him from Edith. But I wish Lily wasn't so vulgar. Maurice won't like living with her." Suddenly she said, "Maurice, do send the nurse out of the room. I want to tell you something, darling." She was very hoarse.

"Better not talk, dear," he said, anxiously.

She smiled and shook her head. "I just want to tell you: I don't mind not getting well, because then you'll marry Lily."

"Eleanor! Don't—don't—"

"And you can give little Jacky the kind of home he ought to have."

She drowsed. Maurice sat beside her with his face buried in his hands. When she awoke, at dusk, she lay peacefully watching the firelight flickering on the ceiling, and, thinking—thinking. Then, into her peace, broke again the memory of Edith's distress. "Perhaps I ought to tell her that I went to the river for Maurice's sake? Not because I was angry at her." She thought of Edith's tears, and said, "Poor Edith—" And when she said that a strange thing happened: pity, like a soft breath, blew out the vehement flame. It is always so; pity and jealousy are never together....

The next morning she remembered her words about Jacky—"the kind of home he ought to have"—and again uneasiness as to the kind of "home" it would be for Maurice rose in her mind. Her head whirled with worry. "It won't be pleasant for him to live with her, even if she can cook. He loves that chocolate cake; but he couldn't bear her grammar. Edith said I was 'unkind' to him. Am I? I suppose she thought he'd be happier with her? Would he? She can make that cake, too. Yes; he would be happier with her than with Lily;—and Jacky would call her 'Mother,"' Then she forgot Edith.

After a while she said: "Maurice, can't I see Jacky? Go get him! And give Lily the car fare."

Maurice went downstairs and called Mrs. Houghton out of the parlor; in the hall he said: "I think Eleanor's sort of mixed up. She is talking about 'Lily's car fare'! What do you suppose she means? Is she—delirious? And then she says she 'wants to see Jacky.' What must I do?"

"Go and get him," she said.

For a bewildered minute he hesitated. If Mrs. Newbolt should see Jacky, she ... would know! And Edith ... would she suspect? Still he went—like a man in a dream. As he got off the car, a block from Lily's door, a glimpse of the far-off end of the route where "Eleanor's meadow" lay, made his purpose still more dreamlike. But he was abruptly direct with Lily: he had come, he said, to tell her that his wife wanted—

"My soul and body!" she broke in; "if she's sent you—" They were in the dining room, Maurice so pale that Lily, in real alarm, had put her hand on his arm and made him sit down. But she was angry. "Has she got on to that again?"

His questioning bewilderment brought her explanation.

"She didn't tell you she'd been here? Well, I promised her I wouldn't give her away to you, and I wouldn't,—but so long as she's sent you, now, there's no harm, I guess, telling you?" So she told him. "What possessed you to let on to her?" she ended. She was puzzled at his folly, but she was sympathetic, too. "I suppose she ragged it out of you?"

Maurice had listened, silently, his elbow on his knee, his fist hard against his mouth; he did not try to tell her why he had "let on"; he could not say that he wanted to defend his son from such a mother; still less could he make clear to her that Eleanor had not "ragged it out of him," but that, to his famished passion for truth, confession had been the Bread of Life. He looked at her once or twice as she talked; pretty, yet; kindly, coarse, honest—and Eleanor had supposed that he would marry her! Then, sharply, his mind pictured that scene: his wife, his poor, frightened old Eleanor, pleading for the gift of Jacky! And Lily—young, arrogant, kind.... The pain of it made his passion of pity so like love that the tears stood in his eyes. "Oh, she mustn't die," he thought; "I won't let her die!"

When Lily had finished her story he told her his, very briefly: his wife's forgiveness of his unfaithfulness; her desire to do all she could for Jacky: "Help me—I mean help you—to make a man of him, because she loves me. Heaven knows I'm not worthy of it."

Lily gulped. "She ain't young; but, my God, she's some woman!" She threw her apron over her face and cried hard; then stopped and wiped her eyes. "She wants to see him, does she? Well, you bet she shall see him! I'll get him; he's playing in at Mr. Dennett's—he's all on being an undertaker now. Mr. Dennett's a Funeral Pomps Director. But he's got to put on his new suit." She ran out on to the porch, and Maurice could hear the colloquy across the fence: "You come in the house, quick!"

"Won't. We're going to in-in-inter a hen."

"Yes, you will! You're going to put on your new suit and go and see a lady—"

"Lady? Not on your life."

"It's Mr. Curtis wants you—" Then Jacky's yell, "Mr. Curtis?" and a dash up the back steps and into the dining room—then, silent, grimy adoration!

Maurice gave his orders. "Change your clothes, young man. I'll bring him back, Lily, as soon as she's seen him."

While he waited for the new suit Maurice walked up and down the little room, round and round the table, where on a turkey-red cloth a hideous hammered brass bowl held some lovely maidenhair ferns. The vision of Eleanor abasing herself to Lily was unendurable. To drive it from his mind, he went to the window and stood looking out through the fragrant greenness of rose geraniums, into the squalid street where the offspring of the Funeral Pomps Director were fighting over the dead hen; from the bathroom came the sound of a sputtering gush from the hot-water faucet; then splashes and whining protests, and maternal adjurations: "You got to look decent! I will wash behind your ears. You're the worst boy on the street!"

"Eleanor tried to save him," he thought; "she came here, and begged for him!"

Above the bathroom noises came Lily's voice, sharp with efficiency, but shaking with pity and a quick-hearted purpose of helping: "Say, Mr. Curtis! Could she eat some fresh doughnuts? (Jacky, if you don't stand still I'll give you a regular spanking! I didn't put soap in your eyes!) If she can, I'll fry some for her to-morrow."

Maurice, tramping back and forth, made no answer; he was saying to himself, "If she'll just live, I will make her happy! Oh, she must live!" It was then that, suddenly, agonizingly, in the midst of splashings, and Jacky's whines, and Lily's anxiety about soap and doughnuts, Maurice Curtis prayed ...

He did not know it was prayer; it was just a cry: "Do something—oh, do something! Do you hear me? She tried so hard to save Jacky. Make her get well!" So it was that, in his selfless cry for happiness for Eleanor, Maurice found all those differing realizations—Joy, and Law, and Life, and Love—and lo! they were one—a personality! God. In his frantic words he established a relationship with Him—not It, any longer! "Please, please make her get well," he begged, humbly.

At that moment, at the door of the dining room, appeared an immaculate Jacky in his new suit, his face shining with bliss and soap. He came and stood beside Maurice, waiting his monarch's orders, and listening, without comprehension, to the conversation:

"Nothing will be said to him that will ... give anything away. She just wants to see him. His presence in the room—"

Jacky gave a little leap. "Did you say presents!"

"—his merely being there will please her. She loves him, Lily. You see, she's always wanted children, and—we've never had any."

Jacky's mother said, in a muffled voice, "My land!" Then she caught Jacky in her arms and kissed him all over his face.

"Aw, stop," said Jacky, greatly embarrassed; to have Mr. Curtis see him being kissed, "like a kid!" was a cruel mortification. "Aw, let up," said Jacky.

When he and Mr. Curtis started in to town his eyes seemed to grow bluer, and his face more beaming, and his voice, asking endless questions, more joyous every minute. In the car he shoved up very close to Maurice, and tried to think of something wonderful to tell him. By and by, breathing loudly, he achieved: "Say, Mr. Curtis, our ash sifter got broke." Then he shoved a little closer. Just before they reached Mrs. Newbolt's house the haggard, unhappy father gave his son orders:

"There is a lady who wants to see you, Jacky. She's my wife. Mrs. Curtis. You are to be very polite to her, and kiss her—"

"Kiss a lady!"

"Yes. You'll do what I tell you! Understand?"

"Yes, sir," Jacky said, sniffling.

"You are to tell her you love her; but you are not to speak unless you are spoken to. Do you get on to that?"

"Yes, sir. No, sir," poor Jacky said, dejectedly.

It was Edith who, watching for Maurice from the parlor window, opened the front door to him. She looked up into his eyes, then down into Jacky's, who, at that moment, took the opportunity, sighing, to obey orders; be reached up and gave a little peck at Edith's cheek.

"I love you," he said, gloomily. "I done it," he told Maurice. "He said I got to," he explained to Edith, resignedly, as she, startled but pleased, took his little rough hand in hers.

Just as she did so Mrs. Newbolt, coming downstairs, saw him and stopped short in the middle of a sentence—the relationship between the man and the child was unmistakable. When she got her breath she said, coldly: "There's a change, Maurice. Better go right upstairs."

He went, hurriedly, leading his little boy by the hand.

"Well, upon my word!" said Mrs. Newbolt, looking after the small, climbing figure in the new suit. "I wouldn't have believed such a thing of Maurice Curtis—oh, my poor Eleanor!" she said, and burst out crying. "I suppose she knows? Did she want to see the child? I always said she was a puffect angel! But I don't wonder she—she got wet ..."

Eleanor was very close to the River now, yet she smiled when Jacky's shrinking lips touched her cheek.

"Take her hand," Maurice told him, softly, and the little boy, silent and frightened, obeyed; but he kept his eyes on his father.

Eleanor, with long pauses, said: "Dear ... Jacky. Maurice, did you give her ... five cents? He must have ... music lessons."

"Yes, Star," he said, brokenly. "Jacky," he said, in a whisper, "say 'I love you.'"

But Jacky whispered back, anxiously, "But I said it to the other one?"

"Say it!" his father said.

"I love you," said Jacky, trembling.

Eleanor smiled, slept for a moment, then opened her eyes. "He doesn't look ... like her?"

"Not in the least," Maurice said.

Jacky, quailing, tried to draw his hand away from those cool fingers; but a look from his father stopped him.

"No," Eleanor murmured; "I see ... it won't do for"—Maurice bent close to her lips, but he could not catch the next words—"for you to marry her."

After that she was silent for so long that Maurice led the little boy out of the room. As he brought him into the parlor, Henry Houghton, who had just come in, looked at the father and son, and felt astonishment tingle in his veins like an electric shock. He gripped Maurice's hand, silently, and gave Jacky's ear a friendly pull.

"Edith," Maurice Said, "I would take him home, but I mustn't leave Eleanor. Will you get one of the maids to put him on a Medfield car—"

"I'll take him," Edith said.

Maurice began to say, sharply, "No!" then he stopped; after all, why not? "She must know the whole business by this time. Jacky's face gives it all away." She might as well, he thought, know Jacky's mother, as she knew his father.

Jacky, in a little growling voice, said, "Don't want nobody to put me on no car. I can—"

"Be quiet, my boy," Maurice said, gently. He gave Edith Lily's address and went back upstairs.

Henry Houghton, watching and listening, felt his face twitch; then he blew his nose loudly. "I'll look after him," he told Edith. "I—I'll take him to—the person he lives with. It isn't suitable for a girl—"

In spite of the gravity of the moment his girl laughed. "Father, you are a lamb! No; I'll take him." Then she gave Jacky a cooky, which he ate thoughtfully.

"We have 'em nicer at our house," he said. On the corner, waiting for the Medfield car, Edith offered a friendly hand, which he refused to notice. The humiliation of being taken home, "by a woman!" was scorching his little pride. He made up his mind that if them scab Dennett boys seen him getting out of the car with a woman, he'd lick the tar out of them! All the way to Maple Street he sat with his face glued to the window, never speaking a word to the "woman." When the car stopped he pushed out ahead of her and tore down the street. Happily no Dennett boys saw him!—but he dashed past his mother, who was standing at the gate, and disappeared in the house.

Lily, bareheaded in the pale April sunshine, had been watching for him rather anxiously. In deference to the occasion she had changed her dress; a string of green-glass beads, encircling her plump white neck, glimmered through the starched freshness of an incredibly frank blouse, and her white duck skirt was spotless. Her whole little fat body was as fresh and sweet as one of her own hyacinths, and her kind face had the unchanging, unhuman youthfulness of flesh and blood which has never been harried by the indwelling soul. But she was frowning. She had begun to be nervous; Jacky had been away nearly two hours! "Are they playing a gum game on me?" Lily thought; "Are they going to try and kidnap him?" It was then that she caught sight of Jacky, tearing toward home, his fierce blue eyes raking the street for any of them there Dennett boys, who must have the tar licked out of 'em! Edith was following him, in hurrying anxiety. Instantly Lily was reassured. "One of Mrs. Curtis's lady friends, I suppose," she thought. "Well, it's up to me to keep her guessing on Jacky!" She was very polite and simpering when, at the gate, Edith said that Mr. Curtis asked her to bring Jacky home.

"Won't you come in and be seated?" Lily urged, hospitably.

Edith said no; she was sorry; but she must go right back; "Mrs. Curtis is very ill, I am sorry to say."

At this moment Jacky came out to the gate; he had two cookies in his hand. He said, shyly: "Maw's is better 'an yours. You can have"—this with a real effort—"the big one."

Edith took the "big one," pleasantly, and said, "Yes, they are nicer than ours, Jacky."

But Lily was mortified. "The lady'll think you have no manners. Go on back into the house!"

"Won't," said Jacky, eating his cooky.

His mother tried to cover his obstinacy with conversation: "He's crazy about Mr. Curtis. Well, no wonder. Mr. Curtis was a great friend of my husband's. Mr. Dale—his name was Augustus; I named Jacky after him; Ernest Augustus. He died three years ago; no, I guess it was two—"

"Huh?" said Jacky, interested, "You said my paw died—"

Lily, with that desire to smack her son which every mother knows, cut his puzzled arithmetic short. "Yes. Mr. Dale was a great clubman. In Philadelphia. I believe that's where he and Mr. Curtis got to be chums. But I never met her."

Edith said, rigidly, "Really?"

"Jacky's the image of Mr. Dale. He died of—of typhus fever. Mr. Curtis was one of the pallbearers; that's how I got acquainted with him. Jacky was six then," Lily ended, breathlessly. ("I guess that's fixed her," she thought.)

Edith only said again, "Really?" Then added, "Good afternoon," and hurried away. So this was the woman Eleanor would make Maurice marry! "Never!" Edith said. "Never! if I can prevent it!"

Upstairs in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room, as the twilight thickened, there was silence, except for the terrible breathing, and the clock ticking away the seconds; one by one they fell—like beads slipping from a string. Maurice sat holding Eleanor's hand. The others, speaking, sometimes, without sound, or moving, noiselessly, stood before the meek majesty of dying. Waiting. Waiting. It was not until midnight that she opened her eyes again and looked at Maurice, very peacefully.

"Tell Edith it wasn't what she said, made me try ... our river ... Jacky will call her ... Tell Edith ... to be kind to Jacky."

She did not speak again.



CHAPTER XXXVII

"I have an uneasy feeling," said Mr. Houghton, "that he is thinking of marrying the woman, just to carry out Eleanor's wish. Poor Eleanor! Always doing the wrong thing, with greatness." This was in September. Maurice was to come up to Green Hill for a Sunday, and the Houghtons were in the studio talking about the expected guest. Later Edith was to drive over to the junction and meet him....

It was not only Green Hill which talked about Maurice. In the months that followed Eleanor's death, a good many people had pondered his affairs, because, somehow, that visit of Jacky's to Mrs. Newbolt's house, got noised abroad, so Maurice's friends (making the inevitable deductions) told one another exactly what he ought to do.

Mrs. Newbolt expressed herself in great detail: "I shall never forgive him," she said; "my poor Eleanor! She forgave him, and sent for the child. More than I would do for any man! But I could have told her what to expect. In fact, I did. I always said if she wasn't entertainin', she'd lose him. Yes; she had a hard time—but she kept her figger. Should Maurice marry the—boy's mother? 'Course not! Puffect nonsense. You think he'll make up to Edith Houghton? She would have too much self-respect to look at him! And if she did, her father would never consent to it."

The Mortons' opinion was just as definite: "I hope Maurice will marry again; Edith's just the girl for him—What!" Mrs. Morton interrupted herself, at a whisper of gossip, "he had a mistress? I don't believe a word of it!"

"But I'm afraid it's true," her husband told her, soberly; "there's a boy." His wife's shocked face made him add: "I think Curtis will feel he ought to legitimatize the youngster by marrying his mother. Maurice is good stuff. He won't sidestep an obligation."

"I never heard of such an awful idea!" said Mrs. Morton, dismayed. "I hope he'll do nothing of the kind! You can't correct one mistake by making another. Don't you agree with me?" she demanded of Doctor Nelson; who displayed, of course, entire ignorance of Mr. Curtis's affairs.

He only said, "Well, it's a rum world."

Johnny Bennett, in Buenos Aires, reading a letter from his father, said: "Poor Eleanor!" ... Then he grew a little pale under his tan, and added something which showed his opinion—not, perhaps, of what Maurice ought to do, but of what he would do! "I might as well make it a three-years' contract," Johnny said, bleakly, "instead of one. Of course there 11 be no use going back home. Eleanor's death settles my hash."

Even Mrs. O'Brien, informed by kitchen leakage as to what had happened, had something to say: "He ought to make an honest woman of the little fellow's mother. But to think of him treating Miss Eleanor that way!"

And now, in the studio, the Houghtons also were saying what Maurice ought—and ought not!—to do: "I'm afraid he's thinking of marrying her," Mr. Houghton had said; and his wife had said, quickly, "I hope so—for the sake of his child!"

"But, Mary," he protested, "look at it from the woman's point of view; this 'Lily' would be wretched if she had to live Maurice's kind of life!"

Edith, standing with her back to her father and mother, staring down into the ashes of the empty fireplace, said, over her shoulder, "Maurice may marry somebody who will help him with Jacky—just as Eleanor would have done, if she had lived."

"My dear," her father said, quickly, "he has had enough of your sex to last his lifetime! As a mere matter of taste, I think Maurice won't marry anybody."

"I don't see why, just because he—did wrong ten years ago," Edith said, "he has got to sidestep happiness for the rest of his life! But as for marrying that Mrs. Dale, it would be a cat-and-dog life."

"Edith," said her father, "when you agree with me I am filled with admiration for your intelligence! Your sex has, generally, mere intuition—a nice, divine thing, and useful in its way. But indifferent to logic. My sex has judgment; so when you, a female, display judgment, I, as a parent, am gratified. 'Cat-and-dog life' is a mild way of putting it;—a quarrelsome home is hell,—and hell is a poor place in which to bring up a child! Mary, my darling, you can derail any train by putting a big enough obstacle on the track; the fact that the obstacle is pure gold, like your idealism, wouldn't prevent a domestic wreck—in which Jacky would be the victim! But in regard to Maurice's marrying anybody else"—he paused and looked at his daughter—"that seems to me undesirable."

Edith's face hardened. "I don't see why," she said; then added, abruptly, "I must go and write some letters," and went quickly out of the room.

They looked after her, and then at each other.

"You see?" Mary Houghton said; "she cares for him!"

"I couldn't face it!" her husband said; "I couldn't have Edith in such a mess. Morally speaking, of course he has a right to marry; but he can't have my girl! Let him marry some other man's girl—and I'll give them my blessing. He's a dear fellow—but he can't have our Edith."

She shook her head. "If it were not for his duty to Jacky, I would be glad to have Edith marry him. And as for saying that she 'can't,' these are not the days, Henry, when fathers and mothers decide whom their girls may marry."

While his old friends were thus talking him over, Maurice was traveling up to the mountains. He had seen Mr. and Mrs. Houghton in Mercer several times since Eleanor's death, but he had not been able to face the associations and recollections of Green Hill. This was largely because, though his friends had, with such ease, reached decisions for him, he was himself so absorbed in indecision that he could not go back to the careless pleasantness of old intimacies, (As for that question of the wheels,—"if—if—if anything happens to Eleanor?"—Eleanor herself had answered it in one word: Lily.) So, since her death Maurice's whole mind was intent on Jacky. What must he do fear him? His occasional efforts to train the child had been met, more than once, by sharp rebuffs. Whenever he went to see Jacky, Lily was perfectly good humored—unless she felt she was being criticized; then the claws showed through the fur!

"You can give me money, if you want to, to send him to a swell school." She said, once; "but I tell you, Mr. Curtis, right out, I ain't going to have you come in between me and Jacky by talking up things to him that I don't care about. All these religious frills about Truth! They say nowadays hardly any rich people tell the truth. And talking grammar to him! You set him against me," she, said, and her eyes filled with angry tears.

"I wouldn't think of setting him against you," he said; "only, I want to do my duty to him."

"'Duty'!" said Lily, contemptuously; "I'm not going to bring him up old-fashioned. And this thing of telling him not to say 'ain't,' I say it, and what else would he say? There ain't any other word. He's my child—and I'll bring him up the way I like! Wait; I'll give you some fudge; I've just made it..."

Maurice, now, on his way up to Green Hill, looking out of the car window, and remembering interviews like this with his son's mother, wondered if Edith had seen Lily the day she took Jacky home? That made him wonder what Edith would think of the whole business? To a woman like Edith it would be simply disgusting. "I'll just drop out of her life," he said. He thought of the day he brought Jacky to Mrs. Newbolt's door, and Edith had looked at him—and then at Jacky—and then at him again. She understood! Would she understand now? Probably not. "Of course old Johnny'll get her ... But, oh, what life might have been!"

Edith had driven over to the junction earlier than was necessary, because she had wanted to get away from her father and mother. "They are afraid he'll fall in love with me," she thought, hotly; "if he ever does, nothing they can say shall separate us. Nothing! But mother'll try to influence him to marry that dreadful creature, and father will say things about 'honor,' so he'll feel he ought never to marry—anybody. Oh, they are lambs," she said, setting her teeth; "but they mustn't keep Maurice from being happy!" At the station, as she sat in the buggy flecking her whip idly, and waiting for Maurice's train, her whole mind was on the defensive. "He has a right to be happy. He has a right to marry again ... but they needn't worry about me!" she thought. "I've never grown up to Maurice. But whatever happens, he shan't marry that woman!"

When Maurice got off the train there was a blank moment when she did not recognize him. As a careworn man came up to her with an outstretched hand and a friendly, "This is awfully nice in you, Skeezics!" she said, with a gasp, "Maurice!" He had aged so that he looked, she thought, as old as Eleanor. But they were both laboriously casual, until the usual remarks upon the weather, and the change in the time-table, had been exhausted.

It was Edith who broke into reality—Maurice had taken the reins, and they were jogging slowly along. "Maurice," she said, "how is Jacky?" His start was so perceptible that she said, "You don't mind my asking?"

"I don't mind anything you could say to me, Edith. I'm grateful to you for asking."

"I want to help you about him," she said.

He put out his left hand and gripped hers. Then he said: "I'm going to do my best for the little fellow. I've botched my own life, Edith;—of course you know that? But he shan't botch his, if I can help it!"

"I think you can help it," Edith said.

His heart contracted; yet it was what he had expected. The idealism of an absolutely pure woman. "Well," he said, heavily, "of course I've got to do what I honestly think is the light thing."

"Are you sure," she said, "that you know what the right thing is? You mustn't make a mistake."

"I may be said to have made my share," he told her, dryly.

She did not answer that; she said, passionately, "Maurice, I'd give anything in the world if I could help you!"

"Don't talk that way," he commanded, harshly. "I'm human! So please don't be kind to me, Edith; I can't stand it."

Instantly her heart pounded in her throat: "He cares. Oh, they can't separate us. But they'll try to." ... The rest of the drive was rather silent. On the porch at Green Hill the two older friends were waiting to welcome him. ("Don't let's leave them alone," Henry Houghton had said, with a worried look; which made his wife, in spite of her own uneasiness, smile, "Oh, Henry, you are an innocent creature!") After dinner Mrs. Houghton, determinedly commonplace, came to the rescue of what threatened to be a somewhat conscious occasion, by talking books and music. Her husband may have been "innocent," but he did his part by shoving a cigar box toward the "boy," and saying, "How's business? We must talk Weston's offer over," he said.

Maurice nodded, but got up and went to the piano; "Tough on you, Skeezics," he said once, glancing at Edith.

"Oh, I don't mind it, much," she said, drolly.

So the evening trudged along in secure stupidity. Yet it was a straining stupidity, and there was an inaudible sigh of relief from everybody when, at last, Mary Houghton said, "Come, good people! It's time to go to bed."

"Yes, turn in, Maurice," said his host; "you look tired." Then he got on his feet, and said good night with an alacrity which showed how much he "wished he was asleep"! But he was not permitted to sleep. Maurice, swinging round from the piano, said, with a rather rigid face:

"Would you mind just waiting a minute and letting me tell you something about myself, Uncle Henry?"

"Of course not!" Mr. Houghton said, with great assumption of cheerfulness. He went back to the sofa—furtively achieving a cigar as he did so—and saying to himself, "Well, at least it will give me a chance to let him see how I feel about his ever marrying again."

Edith was standing by the piano, one hand resting on the keyboard and drumming occasionally in disconnected octaves. ("If it's business," she thought, "I'll leave them alone; but if they are going to 'advise' him, I'll stay—and fight.")

Maurice came and sat on the edge of the big table, his hands in his pockets, and one foot swinging nervously. "I hope you dear people don't think I'm an ungrateful cuss, not to have come to Green Hill this summer; but the fact is, I've been awfully up against it, trying to make up my mind about something."

Henry Houghton looked at the fire end of his cigar with frowning intentness and said yes, he supposed so. "Weston's offer seems to me fair," he said (this referred to a partnership possibility, on which Maurice had consulted him by letter); but his remark, now, was so obviously a running to cover that, in spite of himself, Maurice grinned. "Weston's a very square fellow," said Henry Houghton.

"If you are going to talk 'offers,'" said Edith, "do you want me to clear out?"

"It isn't business," Maurice said, quietly; "it's my ... little son. No; don't clear out, Edith. I'd rather talk to your mother and Uncle Henry before you."

"All right," said Edith, and struck some soft chords; but her young mouth was hard.

"Of course," Maurice said, "as things are now—I mean poor Eleanor gone—I have thought a good deal of what I ought to do for Jacky. It was Nelly's wish that I should do the straight thing for him. There wasn't any question, I think, of the 'straight thing' for Lily—"

"Of course not!" Mary Houghton agreed. And her husband said, "Any such idea would be nonsense, Maurice."

"And I myself don't count," Maurice went on.

Again Mrs. Houghton agreed—very gravely: "Compared to the child, dear Maurice, you don't."

"You do!" Edith said; but nobody heard her.

"So at first," Maurice said, "I kept thinking of how Eleanor had wanted me to have him—legally, you know; wanted it so much that she—" there was a silence in the studio; "that she was glad to die, to make it possible." He paused, and Mary Houghton saw his cheek twitch. "Well, I felt that clinched it. I felt I must carry out her wish, and ask Mrs. Dale to—marry me."

"Morbid," said Henry Houghton.

Edith, listening, said nothing; but she was ready to spring!

"Perhaps it was morbid," Maurice said; "but just at first it seemed that way to me. Then I began to realize that what poor Nelly wanted, wasn't to have me marry Lily—that was only a means to an end; she wanted Jacky taken care of"; (Edith nodded.) "And she thought marrying his mother was the best way to do that." (Edith shook her head.)

"Well; I thought it all over ... I kept myself and my own feelings out of it." Behind those laconic words lay the weeks of struggle, of which even these good friends could have no idea! Weeks in which, while Mercer was deciding what he ought to do, Maurice, "keeping himself out of it," had put aside ambition and smothered taste, and thrown over, once for all, personal happiness. As a wrestler strips from his body all hampering things, so he had stripped from his mind every instinct which might interfere with a straight answer to a straight question: "What will be best for my boy?" He gave the answer now, in Henry Houghton's studio, while Edith, over in the shadows, at the piano, looked at him. Her face was quite pale.

"So all I had to do," said Maurice, "was to think of Jacky's welfare. That made it easier to decide. I find," he said, simply, "that you can decide things pretty easily if you don't have to think of yourself. So I said, 'If I marry Lily, though Jacky couldn't be taken away from me, physically, spiritually'—you know what I mean, Mrs. Houghton?—'he might be removed to—to the ends of the earth!' I might lose his affection; and I've got to hold on to that, at any cost, because that's how I can influence him." He was talking now entirely to Edith's mother, and his voice was harsh with entreaty for understanding. He didn't care very much whether Henry Houghton understood or not. And of course Edith could never understand! But that this serene woman of the stars should misjudge him was unbearable. "You see what I mean, Mrs. Houghton, don't you? I know Lily;—and I know that if she thought I had any right to say how he must be brought up, it would mean nothing but perfectly hideous controversies all the time! So long as she thinks she has the upper hand, she'll be generous; she doesn't mind his being fond of me, you know. But she'd fight tooth and nail if she thought I had any rights! You see that, don't you?"

"I see it!" Edith said.

"Yet from a merely material point of view," said Mrs. Houghton, "in spite of 'controversies,' legitimacy would give Jacky advantages, which—oh, Maurice, don't you see?—your son has a right to!"

But her husband said, quickly, "Mary, living with a quarreling father and mother is spiritual illegitimacy; and the disadvantages of that would be worse than the material handicap of being a—a fatherless child."

His daughter flashed a passionately grateful look at him.

Maurice, still speaking to Edith's mother, said: "That's the way I looked at it, Mrs. Houghton. So it seemed to me that I could do more for him if I didn't marry Lily."

Mary Houghton was silent; it was very necessary to consider the stars.

"I put myself out of it," Maurice said. "I just said, 'If it's best for Jacky, I'll ask her to marry me,' My honest opinion was that it would be bad for him."

Edith struck two chords—and sat down on the piano stool, swallowing hard.

"You don't agree with me, I'm afraid, Mrs. Houghton?" he said, anxiously.

"My dear boy," she said, "I am sure you are doing what you believe to be right. But it does not seem right to me."

He flinched, but he was not shaken; "It isn't going to be easy, whatever I do. I want to educate him, and see him constantly, and influence him as much as possible. And Lily will be less jealous of me, in her own house, than she would be in mine."

Edith got up and came and sat on the arm of the sofa by her father. "I can see," she said, "how much easier it would be for Maurice to do the hard thing."

Maurice looked at her with deep tenderness. "You are a satisfying person!" he said.

Henry Houghton took his girl's hand, and held it in a grip that hurt her. "Maurice is right," he said; "things are not going to be easy for him. For, though he won't marry Jacky's mother, he won't, I think, marry anybody else."

"Why won't he?" said Edith.

"There is no moral reason why he shouldn't," her father conceded; "it is a question of taste; one might perhaps call it a question of honor"—Maurice whitened, but Henry Houghton went on, calmly, "Maurice will, of necessity, be so involved with this woman—and God knows what annoyances she may make for him, that—it distresses me to say so—but I can see that he will not feel like asking any woman to share such a burden as he has to carry."

"If he loves any woman," Edith said, "let him ask her! If she turns him down, it stamps her for a coward!"

"Don't you think I'm right, Maurice?" her father said.

"Yes," Maurice said. "You are right. I've faced that."

Edith sprang to her feet, and stood looking at her father and mother, her eyes stern with protecting passion. "It seems to me absurd," she said,—"like standing up so straight you fall over backward!—for Maurice to feel he can't marry—somebody else, just because he—he did wrong, ever so many years ago! He's sorry, now. Aren't you sorry, Maurice?" she said.

His eyes stung;—the simplicity of the word was like a flower tossed into the black depths of his repentance! "Yes, dear," he said, gently; "I'm 'sorry.' But no amount of 'sorrow' can alter consequences, Edith."

"Oh," she said, turning to the other two, "don't you want Maurice ever to be happy?"

"I want him to be good," said her mother.

"I can't be happy, Edith," Maurice told her; "don't you see?"

She looked straight in his eyes, her own eyes terror-stricken. ... They would drive him away from her! "You shall be happy," she said.

They saw only each other, now.

"No," Maurice said; "it's just as your father says; I have no right to drag any girl into the kind of life I've got to live. I'll have to see Lily a good deal, so as to keep in with her—and be able to look after Jacky. Personal happiness is all over for me."

She caught at his arm; "It isn't! Maurice, don't listen to them!" Then she turned and stood in front of him, as though to put her young breast between him and that tender, menacing parental love. "Oh, mother—oh, father! I do love you; I don't want to do anything you don't approve of;—but Maurice comes first. If he asks me to marry him, I will."

Under his breath Maurice said, "Edith!"

"My darling," Henry Houghton said, "consider: people are bound to know all about this. The publicity will be a very painful embarrassment—"

Edith broke in, "As if that matters!"

"But the serious thing," her father went on, "Is that this woman will be a millstone around his neck—"

"She shall be around my neck, too!" she said. There was a breathless moment; then Truth, nobly naked, spoke: "Maurice, duty is the first thing in the world;—not happiness. If you thought it was your duty to marry Lily, I wouldn't say a word. You would never know that I cared. Never! I'd just stand by, and help you. I'd live in the same house with her, if it would help you! But—" her voice shook; "you don't think it's your duty. You know it isn't! You know that it would make things worse for Jacky,—not better, as Eleanor wanted them to be. So why shouldn't you be happy? Oh, it's artificial, to refuse to be happy!" Before he could speak, she added, quite simply, the sudden tears bright in her eyes, "I know you love me."

He looked at the father and mother: "You wouldn't have me lie to her, would you?—even to save her from herself! ... Of course I love you, Edith,—more than anything on earth,—but I have no right—"

"You have a right," she said.

"I want you," he said, "God knows, it would mean life to me! But—"

"Then take me," she said.

Mrs. Houghton came and put her arms around her girl and kissed her. "Take her, Maurice," she said, quietly. Then she looked at her husband: "Dear," she said, and smiled—a little mistily; "wisdom will not die with us! The children must do what they think is right ... Even if it is wrong." She had considered the stars.

THE END