The Vehement Flame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You're white, Uncle Henry!"

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

"Business," Maurice told her.

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

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

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

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

"Business."

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

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

"Can't tell me, I suppose?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She's not that kind, Mary."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I have several other places to go."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Your first—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was dumb.

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

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

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

"Of course I'll give you whatever you need for—when—when it's born," he said. He was fumbling with his pocketbook; he had nothing more to say about leaving Mercer.

She took the money doubtfully. "I won't want it yet awhile," she said.

"I'll make it more if I can," he told her; he got up, hesitated, then put out his hand. For a single instant, just for her pluck, he was almost fond of her. "Take care of yourself," he said, huskily; and the next minute he was plunging down those three flights of unswept stairs to the street. "My own fault—my own fault," he said, again; "oh, what a cussed, cussed, cussed fool!"

It was over, this dreadful interview! this looking at the dead face of his Youth. Over, and he was back again just where he was when he came in. Nothing settled. Lily—who was so much more generous than he!—would still be in Mercer, waiting for this terrible child. His child!

He had accomplished nothing, and he saw before him the dismaying prospect of admitting his failure to Mr. Houghton. The only comfort in the whole hideous business was that he wouldn't have to pull a lawyer into it, and pay a big fee! He was frantic with worry about expense. Well, he must strike Mr. Weston for a raise!... which he wouldn't tell Eleanor about. A second step into the bog of Secrecy!

When he got home, Eleanor, in the dingy third-floor front, was waiting for him, alert and tender, and gay with purpose: "Maurice! I've counted expenses, and I'm sure we can go to housekeeping! And I can have little Bingo. Mrs. O'Brien says he's just pining away for me!"

"We can't afford it," he said again, doggedly.

"I believe," she said, "you like this horrid place, because you have people to talk to!"

"It's well enough," he said. He was standing with his back to her, his clenched hands in his pockets, staring out of the window. His very attitude, the stubbornness of his shoulders, showed his determination not to go to housekeeping.

"What is the matter, Maurice?" she said, her voice trembling. "You are not happy! Oh, what can I do?" she said, despairingly.

"I am as happy as I deserve to be," he said, without turning his head.

She came and stood beside him, resting her cheek on his shoulder. "Oh," she said, passionately, "if I only had a child! You are disappointed because we have no—"

His recoil was so sharp that she could not finish her sentence, but clutched at his arm to steady herself; before she could reproach him for his abruptness he had caught up his hat and left the room. She stood there quivering. "He would be happier and love me more, if we had a child!" she said again. She thought of the joy with which, when they first went to housekeeping, she had bought that foolish, pretty nursery paper—and again the old disappointment ached under her breastbone. Tears were just ready to overflow; but there was a knock at the door and old Mrs. O'Brien came in with her basket of laundry; she gave her beloved Miss Eleanor a keen look "It's worried you are, my dear? It ain't the wash, is it?"

Eleanor tried to laugh, but the laugh ended in a sob. "No. It's—it's only—" Then she said something in a whisper.

"No baby? Bless you, he don't want no babies! What would a handsome young man like him be wanting a baby for? No! And it would take your good looks, my dear. Keep handsome, Miss Eleanor, and you needn't worry about babies! And say, Miss Eleanor, never let on to him if you see him give a look at any of his lady friends. I'm old, my dear, but I noticed, with all my husbands—and I've had three—that if you tell'em you see'em lookin' at other ladies, they'll look again!—just to spite you. Don't notice'em, and they'll not do it. Men is children."

Eleanor, laughing in spite of her pain, said Mr. Curtis didn't "look at other ladies; but—but," she said, wistfully, "I hope I'll have a baby." Then she wiped her eyes, hugged old O'Brien, and promised to "quit worrying." But she didn't "quit," for Maurice's face did not lighten.

Henry Houghton, too, saw the aging heaviness of the young face when, having received the report of that interview with Lily, he came down to Mercer to go over the whole affair and see what must be done. But there was nothing to be done. Up in his room in the hotel he and Maurice thrashed it all out:

"She prefers to stay in Mercer," Maurice explained; "and she'll stay. There's nothing I can do; absolutely nothing! But she'll play fair. I'm not afraid of Lily."

If Mr. Houghton wished, uneasily, that his ward was afraid of Lily, he did not say so. He only told Maurice again that he was "betting on him."

"You won't lose," Maurice said, laconically.

"Perhaps," Henry Houghton said, doubtfully, "I ought to say that Mrs. Houghton—who is the wisest woman I know, as well as the best—has an idea that in matters of this sort, frankness is the best course. But in your case (of which, of course, she knows nothing) I don't agree with her."

"It would be impossible," Maurice said, briefly. And his guardian, whose belief in secrecy had been shaken, momentarily, by his Mary's opinion, felt that, so long as he had quoted her, his conscience was clear. So he only told the boy again he was sure he could bet on him! And because shame, and those bleak words "my own fault," kept the spiritual part of Maurice alive,—(and because Lily was a white blackbird!) the bet stood.

But he made no promises about the future. However much of a liar Maurice was going to be, to Eleanor, he would not, he told himself, lie to this old friend by saying he would never see Lily again. The truth was, some inarticulate moral instinct made him know that there would come a time when he would have to see her... During all that winter, when he sat, night after night, at Miss Ladd's dinner table, and Eleanor fended off Miss Moore and the widow, or when, in those long evenings in their own room they played solitaire, he was thinking of Lily, thinking of that inner summons to what he called "decency," which would, he knew, drive him—in three months—in two months—in one month!—to Lily's door. By and by it was three weeks—two weeks—one week! Then came days when he said, in terror, "I'll go to-morrow." And again: "To-morrow, I must go. Damn it! I must!" So at last, he went, lashed and driven by that mastering "decency"!

He had bought a box of roses, and, looping two fingers through its strings, he walked twice around the block past the ugly apartment house before he could make up his mind to enter. He wondered whether Lily had died? Women do die, sometimes. "Of course I don't want anything to happen to her; but—" Then he wondered, with a sudden pang of hope, if anything had happened to—It? "They're born dead, sometimes!" Nothing wrong in wishing that, for the Thing would be better off dead than alive. He wished he was dead himself! ... The third time he came to the apartment house the string of the box was cutting into his fingers, and that made him stop, and set his teeth, and push open the door of the vestibule. He touched the button under the name "Dale," and called up, huskily, "Is Miss—Mrs. Dale in?" A brisk voice asked his name. "A friend of Mrs. Dale's," he said, very low. There seemed to be a colloquy somewhere, and then he was told to "come right along!" He turned to the stairway, and as he walked slowly up, it came into his mind that this was the way a man might climb the scaffold steps: Step... Step... Step—his very feet refusing! Step... Step—and Lily's door. The nurse, who met him on the landing, said Mrs. Dale would be glad to see him....

She was in bed, very white and radiant, and with a queer, blanketed bundle on one arm; if she was, as the nurse said, "glad to see him," she did not show it. She was too absorbed in some gladness of her own to feel any other kind of gladness. As Maurice handed her the box of roses, she smiled vaguely and said. "Why, you're real kind!" Then she said, eagerly, "He was born the day the pink hyacinth came out! Want to see him?" Her voice thrilled with joy. Without waiting for his answer—or even giving a look at the roses the nurse was lifting out of their waxed papers, she raised a fold of the blanket and her eyes seemed to feed on the little red face with its tightly shut eyes and tiny wet lips.

Maurice looked—and his heart seemed to drop, shuddering, in his breast. "How nasty!" he thought; but aloud he said, stammering, "Why it's—quite a baby."

"You may hold him," she said; there was a passionate generosity in her voice.

Maurice tried to cover his recoil by saying, "Oh, I might drop it."

Lily was not looking at him; it seemed as if she was glad not to give up the roll of blankets, even for a minute. "He's perfectly lovely. He's a reg'lar rascal! The doctor said he was a wonderful child. I'm going to have him christened Ernest Augustus; I want a swell name. But I'll call him Jacky." She strained her head sidewise to kiss the red, puckered flesh, that looked like a face, and in which suddenly a little orifice showed itself, from which came a small, squeaking sound. Maurice, under the shock of that sound, stood rigid; but Lily's feeble arms cuddled the bundle against her breast; she said, "Sweety—Sweety—Sweety!"

The young man sat there speechless.... This terrible squirming piece of flesh—was part of himself! "I wouldn't touch it for a million dollars!" he was thinking. He got up and said: "Good-by. I hope you—"

Lily was not listening; she said good-by without lifting her eyes from the child's face.

Maurice stumbled out to the staircase, with little cold thrills running down his back. The experience of recognizing the significance of what he had done—the setting in motion that stupendous and eternal Exfoliating, called; Life; the seeing a Thing, himself, separated from himself! himself, going on in spite of himself!—brought a surge of engulfing horror. This elemental shock is not unknown to men who look for the first time at their first-born; instantly the feeling may disappear, swallowed up in love and pride. But where, as with Maurice, there is neither pride nor love, the shock remains. His organic dismay was so overwhelming that he said to himself he would never see Lily again—because he would not see It!—which was, in fact, "he," instead of the girl Lily had wanted. But though his spiritual disgust for what he called, in his own mind, "the whole hideous business," did not lessen, he did, later, through the pressure of those heavy words, "my own fault," go to see Lily—she had taken a little house out in Medfield—just to put down on the table, awkwardly, an envelope with some bills in it. He didn't inquire about It, and he got out of the house as quickly as possible.

Lily had no resentment at his lack of feeling for the child; the baby was so entirely hers that she did not think of it as his, too. This sense of possession, never menaced on Maurice's part by even a flicker of interest in the little thing, kept them to the furtive and very formal acquaintance of giving and receiving what money he could spare—or, oftener, couldn't spare! As a result, he thought of Jacky only in relation to his income. Every time some personal expenditure tempted him, he summed up the child's existence in four disgusted and angry words, "I can't afford it." But it was for Lily's sake, not Jacky's, that he economized! He was wretchedly aware that if it had not been for Jacky, Lily might still be a "saleslady" at Marston's, earning good wages. Instead, she was taking lodgers—and it was not easy to get them!—so that she could be at home and look after the baby.

Maurice aged ten years in that first winter of rigid and unexplainable penuriousness, and of a secrecy which meant perilous skirtings of downright lying; for Eleanor occasionally asked why they had so little money to spend? He had requested a raise—and not mentioned to Eleanor the fact that he had got it. When she complained because his salary was so low, he told her Weston was paying him all he was worth, and he wouldn't strike for more! "So it's impossible to go to housekeeping," he said—for of course she continued to urge housekeeping, saying that she couldn't understand why they had to be so economical! But he refused, patiently. To be patient, Maurice did not need, now, to remind himself of the mountain and her faithfulness to him; he had only to remind himself of the yellow-brick apartment house, and his faithlessness to her. "I've got to be kind, or I'd be a skunk," he used to think. So he was very kind. He did not burst out at her with irritated mortification when she telephoned to the office to know if "Mr. Curtis's headache was better";—he had suffered so much that he had gone beyond the self-consciousness of mortification;—and he walked with her in the park on Sunday afternoons to exercise Bingo; and on their anniversary he sat beside her in the grass, under the locust tree, and watched the river—their river, which had brought Lily into his life!—and listened to the lovely voice:

The next fall, however, the boarding did come to an end, and they went to housekeeping. It was Mrs. Houghton who brought this about. Edith was to enter Fern Hill School in the fall, and her mother had an inspiration: "Let her board with Eleanor and Maurice! The trolley goes right out to Medfield, and it will be very convenient for her. Also, it will help them with expenses," Mrs. Houghton said, comfortably.

"But why can't she live at the school?" Edith's father objected, with a troubled look; somehow, he did not like the idea of his girl in that pathetic household, which was at once so conscious and so unconscious of its own instability! "Why does she have to be with Eleanor and Maurice?" Henry Houghton said.

"Eleanor has the refinement that a hobbledehoy like Edith needs," Mrs. Houghton explained; "and I think the child will have better food than at Fern Hill. School food is always horrid."

"But won't Eleanor's dullness afflict Buster?" he said, doubtfully; then—because at that moment Edith banged into the room to show her shuddering mother a garter snake she had captured—he added, with complacent subtlety, "as for food, I, personally, prefer a dinner of herbs with an interesting woman, than a stalled ox and Eleanor."

Which caused Edith to say, "Is Eleanor uninteresting, father?"

"Good heavens, no!" said Mr. Houghton, with an alarmed look; "of course she isn't! What put such an idea into your head?" And as Buster and her squirming prize departed, he told his Mary that her daughter was destroying his nervous system. "She'll repeat that to Eleanor," he groaned.

His wife had no sympathy for him; "You deserve anything you may get!" she said, severely; and proceeded to write to Eleanor to make her proposition. If they cared to take Edith, she said, they could hire a house and stop boarding—"which is dreadful for both of your digestions; and I will be glad if this plan appeals to you, to feel that Edith is with anyone who has such gentle manners as you."

Eleanor, reading the friendly words at the boarding-house breakfast table, said quickly to herself, "I don't want her... She would monopolize Maurice!" Then she hesitated; "He would be more comfortable in a house of his own... But Edith? Oh, I don't want her!"

She turned to show the letter to Maurice, but he was sitting sidewise, one arm over the back of his chair, in vociferous discussion with a fellow boarder. "No, sir!" he was declaring; "if they revise the rules again, they'll revise the guts out of the whole blessed game; they'll make it all muscle and no mind."

"But football isn't any intellectual stunt," the other boarder insisted.

"It is—to a degree. The old flying wedge—"

"Maurice!" Eleanor said again; but Maurice, impassioned about "rules," didn't even hear her. She gave his arm a little friendly shake. "Maurice! You are the limit, with your old football!"

He turned, laughing, and took the letter from her hand. As he read it, his face changed sharply. "But Fern Hill is in Medfield!" he exclaimed.

"I suppose she could take the trolley almost to the school grounds," Eleanor conceded, reluctantly.

"Why can't she live out there? It's a boarding school, isn't it?" (She might meet Lily on the car!)

For a moment she accepted his decision with relief; then the thought of his comfort urged her: "I know of an awfully attractive house, with a garden. Little Bingo could hide his bones in it."

"No," he said, sharply; "it wouldn't do. I don't want her."

Instantly Eleanor was buoyantly ready to have Edith ... he "didn't want her!" When Maurice rose from the table she went to the front door with him, detaining him—until the pretty school-teacher was well on her way down the street;—with tender charges to take care of himself. Then, in the darkness of the hall, with Maurice very uneasy lest some one might see them, she kissed him good-by. "If we could afford to keep house without taking Edith," she said, "I'd rather not have her. (Kiss me again—no-body's looking!) But we can't. So let's have her."

"In two years I'll have my own money," he reminded her; "this hard sledding is only temporary." But she looked so disappointed that he hesitated; after all, if she wanted a house so much he ought not to stand in the way. Poor Eleanor hadn't much fun! And, as far as he was concerned, he would like to have Edith around. "It's only the Medfield part of it I don't like," he told himself. Yet Lily, on Maple Street, a mile from Fern Hill, was a needle in a haystack! (And even if Edith should ever see her, she wouldn't know her.) ... "If you really want to have her," he told Eleanor, "go ahead."

So that was how it happened that Edith burst in upon Eleanor's dear domesticity of two. Maurice, having once agreed to his wife's wish, was rather pleased at the prospect. "It will help on money," he thought; "another hundred a year will come in handy to Lily. And it will be sort of nice to have Buster in the house."

Lily had not said she must have another hundred. She did not even think so. "I can swing it!" Lily had said, sturdily. And she did; but of course, as Maurice, to his intense discomfort, knew only too well, it was hard to swing it. Even with what help he could give her, she couldn't possibly have got along if she had not been astonishingly efficient and thrifty, always looking at both sides of a cent! "I ain't smoking any more," Lily said once; "well, 'tain't only to save money; but I don't want Jacky to be getting any funny ideas!" (this when "Ernest Augustus" was only a few months old!) She had a tiny house on Maple Street, with a sun-baked front yard, in which a few shrubs caught the dust on their meager foliage; and she had a border of pansies in the shade under the bay window;—"I must have flowers!" Lily said, apologetically;—and she had three roomers, and she had scraped the locality for mealers. She would have made more money if she had not fed her boarders so well. "But there!" said Lily; "if I give 'em nice food, they'll stay!" But, all the same, Maurice knew that two or three dollars more a week would "come in handy." His sense of irritated responsibility about her made him long for that twenty-fifth birthday which would bring him his own money. For, in spite of Lily's thriftiness, her expenses, as well as her toil, kept increasing, and Maurice, cursing himself whenever he thought that but for him she would be "on easy street" at Marston's, had begun the inevitable borrowing. The payment of the interest on his note was a tax on his salary; yet not so taxing as the necessity of being constantly on guard against some careless word which might make Eleanor ask questions about that salary.

But Eleanor asked very few questions about anything so practical as income. Her interest in money matters, now, in regard to Edith, was merely that Edith was a means to an end—Maurice could have his own home! The finding a house, under Mrs. Newbolt's candid guidance—and Maurice's worried reminders that he couldn't "afford" more than so much rent!—gave Eleanor the pleasantest summer she had had since that first summer when, in the meadow, she and Maurice had watched the clouds, and the locust blossoms, and told each other that nothing in heaven or earth, or the waters under the earth, could part them...

The old house they finally secured was in an unfashionable locality; there was a tailor shop next door and an undertaker across the street, and a clanging trolley car screeched on the curve at the end of the block; but the dignity of the pillared doorway, and the carved window casings, had appealed to Maurice; and also the discovery in the parlor, behind a monstrous air-tight stove, of a bricked-up fireplace (which he promptly tore open), all combined to make undertakers and tailors, as neighbors, unimportant! On the rear of the house was an iron veranda—roped with wistaria; below, inclosed in a crumbling brick wall, was the back yard—"Garden, if you please!" Maurice announced—for Bingo's bones. Clumps of Madonna lilies had bloomed here, and died, and bloomed again, for almost a century; the yard was shaded by a silver poplar, which would gray and whiten in the wind in hot weather, or delicately etch itself against a wintry sky. A little path, with moss between the bricks and always damp in the shadow of the poplar, led from the basement door to an iron gate; through its rusty bars one could see, a block away, the slipping gleam of the river, hurrying down from "their meadow," to disappear under the bridge. Maurice said he would build a seat around the poplar, "... and we'll put a table under it, and paint it green, and have tea there in the afternoon! Skeezics will like that."

"Edith looks healthy," said Mrs. Newbolt; "my dear father used to say he liked healthy females. Old-fashioned word—females. Well, I'm afraid dear father liked 'em too much. But my dear mother—she was a Dennison—pretended not to see it. She had sense. Great thing in married life, to have sense, and know what not to see! Pity Edith's not musical. Have you a cook? I believe she'd have caught you, Maurice, if Eleanor hadn't got in ahead! I brought a chocolate drop for Bingo. Here, Bingo!"

Bingo, silky and snarly, climbed on to her steeply sloping black-satin lap, ate the chocolate drop—keeping all the while a liquid and adoring eye upon his mistress—then slid down and ran to curl up on Eleanor's skirt.

By September the moving and seat building were accomplished—the last not entirely on Edith's account; it was part of Maurice's painstaking desire to do something—anything!—for "poor Eleanor," as he named her in his remorseful thought. There was never a day—indeed, there was not often an hour!—when his own meanness to his wife (combined with disgust at being a liar) did not ache somewhere in the back of his mind. So he tried, in all sorts of anxious ways, to please her. He almost never saw Lily; but the thought of her often brought Eleanor a box of candy or a bunch of violets. Such expenditures were slightly easier for him now, because he had had another small raise,—which this time he had told Eleanor about. On the strength of it he said to himself that he supposed he ought to give Lily a little something extra? So on the day when Mrs. Houghton and Edith were to arrive in Mercer, he went out to Medfield to tell Jacky's mother that she might count on a few dollars more each month. The last time he had seen her, Lily had told him that Jacky "was fussing with his teeth something fierce. I had to hire a little girl from across the street," she said, "to take him out in the perambulator, or else I couldn't 'tend to my cooking. It costs money to live, Mr. Curtis," Lily had said, "and eggs are going up, awful!" She had never gone back to the familiarity of those days when she called him "Curt." That he, dull and preoccupied, still called her Lily gave her, somehow, such a respectful consciousness of his superiority that she had hesitated to speak of anything so intimate as eggs... "Yes, I must give her something extra," Maurice thought, remembering the "cost" of living. "Talk about paying the piper! I bet I'm paying him, all right!"

He was to meet Mrs. Houghton at seven-thirty that night, and it occurred to him that if he told Eleanor he had some extra work to do at his desk he could wedge this call in between office hours and the time when he must go to the station—("and they call me 'G. Washington'!") He felt no special cautiousness in going out to Maple Street; the few people he knew in Mercer did not frequent this locality, and if any of them should chance to see him—a most remote possibility!—why, was he not in the real-estate business, and constantly looking at houses? On this particular afternoon, jolting along in the trolley car, he grimly amused himself with the thought of what he would do if, say, Eleanor herself should see him turning that infernally shrill bell on Lily's door. It was a wild flight of imagination, for Eleanor never would see him—never could see him! Eleanor, who only went to Medfield when their wedding anniversary came round, and she dragged him out to sit by the river and sentimentalize! He thought of the loveliness of that past June—and the contrasting and ironic ugliness of the present September.... Now, the little secret house in the purlieus of Mercer's smoke and grime; then, the river, and the rippling tides of grass and clover, and the blue sky—and that ass, lying at the feet of a woman old enough to be his mother!

He laughed as he swung off the car—then frowned; for he saw that to reach Lily's door he would have to pass a baby carriage standing just inside the gate. He didn't glance into the carriage at the roly-poly youngster. He never, on the rare occasions when he went to see Lily, looked at his child if he could avoid doing so—and she never asked him to. Once, annoyed at Jacky's shrill noisiness, he had protested, frowning: "Can't you keep it quiet? It needs a spanking!" After that indifferent criticism ("For I don't care how she brings it up!") Lily had not wanted him to see her baby. She could not have said just why—perhaps it was fear lest Maurice would notice his growing perfection—but when Jacky's father came she kept Jacky in the background! On this September afternoon she said, as she opened the door:

"Why, you're a great stranger! Come right in! Wait a second till I get Jacky. I've just nursed him and I put him out there so I could watch him while I scrubbed the porch." She ran out to the gate, then pushed the carriage up the path.

"Let me help you," Maurice said, politely; adding to himself, "Damn—damn—!" Stepping backward, he lifted the front wheels, and with Lily's help pulled the perambulator on to the little porch and over the threshold into the house—which always shone with immaculate neatness and ugly comfort. He kept his eyes away from the sleeping face on the pillow. Together they got the carriage into the hall—Lily fumbling all the while with one hand to fasten the front of her dress and skipping a button or two as she did so; but he had a glimpse of the heavy abundance of her bosom, and thought to himself that, esthetically, maternity was rather unpleasant.

"Go on into the parlor and sit down," she said; "I'll put him in the kitchen," She pushed the elaborate wicker perambulator, adorned with bows of blue-satin ribbon, down a dark entry smelling of very good soup stock. When she came back she found Maurice, his hat and stick in his hands, standing in her tiny front room, where the sunny window was full of geraniums and scraggly rose bushes. "I got 'em in early. And I dug up my dahlias—I was afraid of frost. (Mercy! I must clean that window on the outside!) Well, you are a stranger!" she said, again, good-naturedly. Then she sighed: "Mr. Curtis, Jacky seems kind o' sick. He's been coughing, and he's hot. Would you send for a doctor, if you was me?"

"Why, if you're worried, yes," Maurice said, impatiently; "I was just passing, and—No, thank you; I won't sit down. I was passing, and I thought I'd look in and give you a—a little present. If the youngster's upset, it will come in well," he ended, as his hand sought his waistcoat pocket. Lily's face was instantly anxious.

"What! Did you think he looked sick, too? I was kind of worried, but if you noticed it—"

"I didn't in the least," he said, frowning; "I didn't look at him."

"He 'ain't never been what you'd call sick," Lily tried to reassure herself; "he's a reg'lar rascal!" she ended, tenderly; her eyes—those curious amber eyes, through which sometimes a tigress looks!—looked now at Maurice in passionate motherhood.

Maurice, putting the money down on the table, said, "I wish I could do more for you, Lily; but I'm dreadfully strapped."

"Say, now, you take it right back! I can get along; I got my two upstairs rooms rented, and I've got a new mealer. And if Jacky only keeps well, I can manage fine. But that girl that's been wheelin' him has measles at her house—little slut!" Lily said (the yellow eyes glared); "she didn't let on to me about it. Wanted her two dollars a week! If Jacky's caught 'em, I—I'll see to her!"

"Oh, he's all right," Maurice said; he didn't like "it"—although, if it hadn't been for "it" he would probably, long before this, have slipped down into the mere comfort of Lily; "it" held him prisoner in self-contempt; "it," or perhaps the larger It? the It which he had seen first in his glorious, passionately selfish ecstasy on his wedding day; then glimpsed in the awful orderliness of the universe,—the It that held the stars in their courses! Perhaps the tiny, personal thing, Joy, and the stupendous, impersonal thing, Law, and the mysterious, unseen thing, Life, were all one? "Call it God," Maurice had said of ecstasy, and again of order; he did not call Jacky's milky lips "God." The little personality which he had made was not in the least God to him! On the contrary, it was a nuisance and a terror, and a financial anxiety. He shrank from the thought of it, and kept "decent," merely through disgust at the child as an entity—an entity which had driven him into loathsome evasions and secrecies which once in a while sharpened into little lies. But he was faintly sorry, now, to see Lily look unhappy about the Thing; and he even had a friendly impulse to comfort her: "Jacky's all right! But I'll send a doctor in, if you want me to. I saw a doctor's shingle out as I came around the corner."

She said she'd be awfully obliged; and he, looking at his watch, and realizing that Mrs. Houghton's train was due in less than an hour, hurried off.

The doctor's bell was not answered promptly; then the doctor detained him by writing down the address, getting it wrong, correcting it, and saying: "Mrs. Dale? Oh yes; you are Mr. Dale?"

"No—not at all! Just a friend. I happened to be calling, and Mrs. Dale asked me to stop and ask you to come in."

Then he rushed off. On the way to town, staring out of the window of the car, he tingled all over at Doctor Nelson's question: "You are Mr. Dale?"... "Why the devil did I offer to get a doctor? I wish Lily would move to the ends of the earth; or that the brat would get well; or—or something."

There was a little delay in reaching the station, and when he got there, it was to find that Mrs. Houghton's train was in and she and Edith, shifting for themselves, had presumably taken a hack to find their way to Maurice's house. He was mortified, but annoyed, too, because it involved giving Eleanor some sort of lying explanation for his discourtesy. "I'll have to cook up some kind of yarn!" he thought, disgustedly...

When Edith and her mother had arrived, unaccompanied by Maurice, Eleanor was sharply worried; had anything happened to him? Oh, she was afraid something had happened to him! "Where do you suppose he is?" she said, over and over. "I'm always so afraid he's been run over!" And when Maurice, flushed and apologetic, appeared, she was so relieved that she was cross. What on earth had detained him? "How did you miss them?"

So Maurice immediately told half of the truth,—this being easier for him than an out-and-out lie. He had been detained because he had to go and see a house in Medfield. "Awfully sorry, Mrs. Houghton!"

Eleanor said she should have thought he needn't have stayed long enough to be late at the station! Well, he hadn't stayed long; but the—"the tenant was afraid her baby had measles and she had asked him to go and get a doctor, and—"

"Of course!" Mrs. Houghton said; "don't give it a thought, Maurice. John Bennett met us—you knew he was at the Polytechnical?—and brought us here. But, anyhow, Edith and I were quite capable of looking out for ourselves; weren't we, Edith?"

Edith, almost sixteen now, long-legged, silent, and friendly, said, "Yes, mother" and helped herself so liberally to butter that her hostess thought to herself, "Gracious!"

However, assured that Maurice had not been run over, Eleanor was really indifferent to Edith's appetite, for the sum Mrs. Houghton had offered for the girl's board was generous. So, proud of the new house, and pleased with sitting at the head of her own table, and hoping that Maurice would like the pudding, which, with infinite fussing, she had made with her own hands, she felt both happy and hospitable. She told Edith to take some more butter (which she did!); and tell Johnny to come to dinner some night, "and we'll have some music," she added, kindly.

"Johnny doesn't like music," said Edith; "well, I don't, either. But I guess he'll come. He likes food."

Edith effaced herself a good deal in the few days that, her mother stayed on in Mercer to launch her at Fern Hill; effaced herself, indeed, so much that Maurice, full of preoccupations of his own, was hardly aware of her presence!... He had had a scared note from Lily:

Doctor Nelson says he's awful sick, and I've got to have a nurse. I don't like to, because I can't bear to have anybody do for him but me, and she charges so much. Makes me tired to see her all fussed up in white dresses—I suppose it's her laundry I'm paying for! That little girl he caught it from ought to be sent to a Reformatory. I'm afraid my new mealer'll go, if she thinks there's anything catching in the house. I hate to ask you—

The scented, lavender-colored envelope was on Maurice's desk at the office the morning after Mrs. Houghton and Edith arrived. When he had read it, and torn it into minute scraps, Maurice had something else to think of than Edith! He knew Lily wouldn't want to leave "her" baby to go out and cash a money order, and checks were dangerous; so he must take that trip to Medfield again. "Well," said Maurice—pulled and jerked out to Maple Street on the leash of an ineradicable sense of decency—"the devil is getting his money's worth out of me!"

He entered No. 16 without turning the clanging bell, for the door was ajar. Lily was in the entry, talking to the doctor, who gave Mrs. Dale's "friend" a rather keen look. "Oh, Mr. Curtis, he's awful sick!" Lily said; she was haggard with fright.

Maurice, swearing to himself for having arrived at that particular moment, said, coldly, "Too bad."

"Oh, we'll pull him through," the doctor said, with a kind look at Lily. She caught his hand and kissed it, and burst out crying. The two men looked at each other—one amused, the other shrinking with disgust at his own moral squalor. Then from the floor above came a whimpering cry, and Lily, calling passionately, "Yes, Sweety! Maw's coming!" flew upstairs.

"I'll look in this evening," Doctor Nelson said, and took himself off, rubbing the back of his hand on his trousers. "I wonder if there's any funny business there?" he reflected. But he thought no more about it until weeks afterward, when he happened, one day, in the bank, to stand before Maurice, waiting his turn at the teller's window. He said, "Hello!" and Maurice said, "Hello!" and added that it was a cold day. The fact that Maurice said not a word about that recovering little patient in Medfield made the doctor's mind revert to the possibilities he had recognized in Lily's entry.

"Yet he looks too decent for that sort of thing," the doctor thought; "well, it's a rum world." Then Maurice took his turn at the window, and Doctor Nelson put his notes in his pocket, and the two men nodded to each other, and said, "By," and went their separate ways.

Edith's first winter in Mercer went pretty well; she was not fussy about what she had to eat; "I can always stoke on bread and butter," she said, cheerfully; and she was patient with the aging Bingo's yapping jealousies; "The smaller a dog is, the more jealous he is!" she said, with good-humored contempt; and she didn't mind Eleanor's speechlessness. "I talk!" Edith said. But Maurice?... "I love him next to father and mother," Edith thought; but, all the same, she didn't know what to make of Maurice! He had very little to say to her—which made her feel annoyingly young, and made him seem so old and stern that sometimes she could hardly realize that he was the Maurice of the henhouse, and the camp, and the squabbles. Instead, he was the Maurice of that night on the river, the "Sir Walter Raleigh" Maurice! Once in a while she was quite shy with him. "He's awfully handsome," she thought, and her eyes dreamed. "What a clod Johnny is, compared to him!" ... As for Eleanor, Edith, being as unobservant as most sixteen-year-old girls, saw only the lovely dark eyes and the beautiful brow under the ripple of soft black hair, Eleanor's sterile silences did not trouble her, and she never knew that the traces of tears meant a helpless consciousness that dinner had been a failure. The fact was, she never noticed Eleanor's looks! She merely thought Maurice's wife was old, and didn't "get much fun out of life—she just plays on the piano!" Edith thought. Pain of mind or body was, to Edith—as probably it ought to be to Youth—unintelligible; so she had no sympathy. In fact, being sixteen, she had still the hard heart of a child.

It may have been the remembrance of Sir Walter Raleigh that made her, one night, burst into reminiscent questions:

"Maurice! Do you remember the time that boat upset, and that girl—all painted, you know—flopped around in the water?"

Maurice said, briefly, why, yes; he believed he remembered.

"I remember that girl, too," Eleanor said; "Maurice told me about her."

"Well, what do you suppose?" Edith said; "I saw her to-day."

Maurice, pushing back his chair, got up and went into the little room opening into the dining room, which they called the library. At his desk, his pen in his hand, his jaw set, he sat listening—listening! What in hell would she say next? What she said was harmless enough:

"Yes, I saw her. I was walking home, and on Maple Street who should I see going into a house but this woman! She was lugging a flower pot, and a baby. And,—now, isn't this funny?—she sort of stumbled at the gate, right by me! And I grabbed her, and kept the child from falling; and I said—" In the library Maurice's face was white—"I said, 'Why, I saw you once—you're Miss Dale. Your boat upset,' And she said, 'You have the advantage of me.' Of course she isn't a lady, you know."

Eleanor smiled, and called significantly to her husband, "Edith says your rescued friend isn't a 'lady,' Maurice!" He didn't answer, and she added to Edith, "No; she certainly isn't a lady! Darling," she called again; "do you suppose she's got married?"

To which he answered, "Where did I put those sheets of blotting paper, Eleanor?"

"Oh yes, she's married," Edith said, scraping her plate; "she told me her name was Mrs. Henry Dale. She couldn't seem to remember Maurice giving her his coat, which I thought was rather funny in her, 'cause Maurice is so handsome you'd think she'd remember him. And I said he was 'Mr. Curtis,' and she said she'd never heard the name. I got to talking to her," ("I bet you did," Maurice thought, despairingly); "and she told me that 'Jacky' had had the measles, and been awfully sick, but he was all well now, and she'd taken him into Mercer to get him a cap." ("What's Lily mean by bringing the Thing into town!" Jacky's father was saying through set teeth.) "She was perfectly bursting with pride about him," Edith went on; "said he was 'a reg'lar rascal'! Isn't it queer that I should meet her, after all these years?"

When Eleanor went into the library to hunt for the blotting paper, she, too, commented on the queerness of Edith's stumbling on the lady who wasn't a lady. "How small the world is!" said Eleanor. "Why, Maurice, here's the paper! Right before you!"

"Oh," said Maurice, "yes; thank you." He was saying to himself, "I might have known this kind of thing would happen!" He was consumed with anxiety to ask Edith some questions, but of course he had to be silent. To show even the slightest interest was impossible—and Edith volunteered no further information, for that night Eleanor took occasion to intimate to her that "Mrs. Dale" must not be referred to. "You can't speak of that kind of person, you know."

"Why not?" Edith said.

"Well, she isn't—nice. She wasn't married. And Edith, it really isn't good taste to tell a man, right to his face, that he's handsome! I don't think any man likes flattery."

"You mean because I said Maurice was handsome? I didn't say it to his face—he was in the library. And it isn't flattery to tell the truth. He is! As for Mrs. Dale, she is married; this little Jacky was her baby! She said so. He had the bluest eyes! I never saw such blue eyes—except Maurice's. 'Course she's not a lady; but I don't see what right you have to say she isn't nice."

Eleanor, laughing, threw up despairing hands; "Edith, don't you know anything?"

"I know everything," Edith said, affronted; "I'm sixteen. Of course I know what you mean; but Mrs. Dale isn't—that. And," Edith ended, on the spur of the moment, "and I'm going to see her sometime!" The under dog always appealed to Edith Houghton, and when Eleanor left her, appalled by her failure to instill proprieties into her, Edith was distinctly hot. "I'm not going to see her!" she told herself. "I wouldn't think of such a thing. But I won't listen to Eleanor abusing her."

As for Eleanor, she confided her alarm to Maurice. "She mustn't go to see that woman!"

His instant horrified agreement was a satisfaction to her: "Of course not!"

"She won't listen to me," Eleanor complained; "you'll have to tell her she mustn't."

"I will," he said, grimly.

And the very next day he did. He happened (as it seemed) to start for his office just as Edith started for school, so they walked along together.

"Edith," he said, the moment they were clear of his own doorway and Eleanor's ears; "that Mrs. Dale; I'd keep away from her, if I were you."

"Goodness!" said Edith; "did you suppose I was going to fall into her arms? Why should I have anything to do with her?"

"Eleanor said you said—"

"Oh, I just said that because Eleanor was down on her, and that made me mad. I couldn't go and see her, if I was dying to—'cause I don't know where she lives—unless it was that house she was going into? Do you know, Maurice?"

"Great Scott! How should I know where she lives?"

"'Course not," said Edith.

But it was many days before Maurice's alarm quieted down sufficiently to let him drift back into the furtive security of knowing that neither Edith nor Eleanor could, by any possibility, get on Lily's track. "And, besides, Lily's too good a sport to give anything away. Pretty neat in her to 'forget' that coat! But she ought to be careful not to forget her husband's name!—it seems to be Henry, now."