t the little dog.
"There, Bingo!... Eleanor, he's losing his waist line. But this cake
won't fatten him! It's sawdust."

"Hannah _is_ a poor cook," she agreed, nervously; "but if I didn't keep
her I don't know what she would do, she's so awfully deaf! She couldn't
get another place."

"Why don't you teach her to do things? I suppose she thinks we can live
on love," he said, chuckling.

She bit her lip,--and thought of Mrs. Newbolt. "Because I don't know how
myself," she said.

"Why don't you learn?" he suggested, feeding the rest of his cake to
Bingo; "Edith used to make bully cake--"

She said, with a worried look, that she _would_ try--

Instantly he was patient and very gentle, and said that the cake didn't
matter at all! "But I move we try boarding."

They were silent, watching the slipping gleam on the ripples, until
Eleanor said, "Oh, Maurice,--if we only had a child!"

"Maybe we will some day," he said, cheerfully. Then, to tease Bingo, he
put his arms around his wife and hugged her,--which made the little dog
burst into a volley of barks! Maurice laughed, but remembered that he
was hungry and said again, "Let's board."

Eleanor, soothing Bingo, wild-eyed and trembling with jealous love, said
no! she would try to have things better. "Perhaps I'll get as clever as
Edith," she said--and her lip hardened.

He said he wished she would: "Edith used to make a chocolate cake I'd
sell my soul for, pretty nearly! Why didn't Hannah give us hard-boiled
eggs?" he pondered, burrowing in the luncheon basket for something more
to eat; "they don't take brains!"

Of course he was wrong; any cooking takes brains--and nobody seemed
able, in his little household, to supply them. However, boarding was
such a terrible threat, that Eleanor, dismayed at the idea of leaving
that little room, waiting at the top of the house, with its ducks and
shepherdesses; and thinking, too, of a whole tableful of people who
would talk to Maurice! made heroic efforts to help Hannah, her mind
fumbling over recipes and ingredients, as her hands fumbled over dishes
and oven doors and dampers. She only succeeded in burning her wrist
badly, and making the deaf Hannah say she didn't want a lady messing up
her kitchen.

By degrees, however, "living on love" became more and more
uncomfortable, and in October the fiasco of a little dinner for Henry
Houghton made Maurice say definitely that, when their lease expired,
they would board. Mr. Houghton