g. Well; I can't hang round with you any
more, as if we were ten years old. You see, I--I love you, Edith. That
makes the difference ... dear."

"Oh," said Edith, desperately, "how perfectly _horrid_--" She looked
really distracted, poor child! (but that was the moment when her
preposterous youthfulness ceased.) She jumped to her feet so suddenly
that Johnny, who had begun, his fingers trembling, to scrape out the
bowl of his pipe, dropped his jackknife, which rolled down the steeply
sloping rock into the water. "Oh, I'm so sorry!" Edith said.

John sighed. "Oh, that's nothing," he said, and slid over the moss and
ferns to the water's edge; there, lying flat on his stomach, his sleeve
rolled up, he thrust his bare white arm into the dark and troutless
depths of the pool, and salvaged his knife. Edith, on the bank, began
furiously to pack up. When Johnny climbed back to her she said she
wanted to go home, "_now_!"

"All right," he said again, gently.

So, silently, they started homeward; and never in her life had Edith
been so glad to see any human creature as she was to see Maurice on the
West Branch Road! But she let him do all the talking. To herself she was
saying, "It's all Eleanor's fault for not letting him come this morning!
I just hate her!..."

That night her father said to her mother, rather sadly, "Mary, our
little girl has grown up. Johnny Bennett is casting sheep's eyes at
her."

"Nonsense!" said Mary Houghton, comfortably; "she's a perfect child, and
so is he."

CHAPTER XIX

Curiously enough, though Edith's mother did not recognize what was going
on between "the children," Eleanor did. When she came back to Mercer, a
week later, she overflowed about it to Maurice. "Calf love!" she summed
it up.

"She didn't look down on that kind of love seven years ago," he thought,
cynically. But he didn't say so; no matter what his thoughts were, he
was always kind to Eleanor. Lily, over in Medfield; Lily, in the small,
secret house; Lily, with the good-looking little boy--blue-eyed,
rosy-cheeked, blond-haired!--the squalid memory of Lily, said to him,
over and over: "You are a confounded liar; so the least you can do is to
be decent to Eleanor."

So he was kind.

"_I_ couldn't bear myself," he used to think, "if I wasn't--but, _O_
Lord!"

That "_O_ Lord!" was his summing up of a growing and demoralizing sense
of the worthlessness and unreality of life. Like Solomon (and all the
rest of us, who