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 fl