owers!" 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 aga