them
down, turning his back on the clean freedom of Truth; and the burden of
his squalid secret, which he had been ready to throw away forever, was
again packed like some corroding thing in his soul....

When, late in August, he and Eleanor went to Green Hill for a few days
vacation, the effect of this repression was marked. There were wrinkles
on his forehead under the thatch of his blond hair; his blue eyes were
dulled, and he was taciturn to the point of rudeness--except to Eleanor.
He was very polite to Eleanor. He never, now, amused himself by
imagining how he could disappear if he had the luck to be in a theater
fire. He knew that because he had enslaved himself to a lie, he had lost
the right even to dream freedom. So there were no more "fool thoughts"
as to how a man might "kick over the traces." There was nothing for him
to do, now (he said), but "play the game." The Houghtons were uneasily
aware of a difference in him; and Edith, fifteen now, felt that he had
changed, and had fits of shyness with him. "He's like he was that night
on the river," she told herself, "when he gave the lady his coat." She
sighed when she said this, and it occurred to her that she would be a
missionary. "I won't get married," she thought; "I'll go and nurse
lepers. He's _exactly_ like Sir Walter Raleigh."

But of course she had moments of forgetting the lepers--moments when she
came down to the level of people like Johnny Bennett. When this
happened, she thought that, instead of going to the South Seas, she
would become a tennis star and figure in international tournaments; even
Johnny admitted that she served well--for a girl. One day she confessed
this ambition to Maurice, but he immediately beat her so badly that she
became her old childlike, grumpy self, and said Johnny was nicer for
singles; which enabled Maurice to turn her loose on John and go off
alone to climb the mountain. He had a dreary fancy for looking at the
camp, and living over again those days when he was still young--and a
fool, of course; but not so great a fool as now, with Lily living in a
little flat in Mercer. Batty's lease had expired, and she had moved into
a cheaper, but still ornate, apartment house on the other side of the
river. Well! Lily had floated into his life as meaninglessly as a mote
floats into a streak of light, and then floated out again. He hadn't
seen her since--since that time in May.

_"Ass--ass!"_ he said to himself. "If Eleanor _knew_,