t was impossible to
be sure on which of the small porches she had seen her husband, and a
fat, common-looking woman, and a child playing in the yard. All she
could do was to wander up and down the block, looking at every front
door in the hope that he would appear; as he didn't, she finally took
the next car into town.

"Did you sell the house this afternoon?" she asked Maurice at dinner
that night; and he, remembering how part of his afternoon had been
spent, said he hadn't any particular house on the string at the moment.

"Then what took you to Medfield?" Eleanor asked, simply.

"Medfield!"

"I saw you out there this afternoon," she said; "you were talking to a
woman. I supposed she was a tenant. I got off the car to walk home with
you, but I wasn't sure of the house; they were all alike."

"What were you doing in Medfield?"

"Oh, Hannah has given notice; I was hunting for a cook. I heard of one
out on Bell Street."

"Did you find her?"

"No," Eleanor said, sighing, "it's perfectly awful!"

"Too bad!" her husband sympathized.

In the parlor, after dinner, while Eleanor was getting out the cards
for solitaire, Maurice, tingling with alarm and irritation, sat down
at the piano and banged out all sorts of chords and discords. "Lily'll
_have_ to move," he was saying to himself. (Bang--_Bang!_) His
Imagination raced with the possibilities of what would have happened
if Eleanor had found the house which was "like all the other houses,"
and heard his "good-by" to Lily, or perhaps even caught the latest
addition to Jacky's vocabulary! "The jig would have been up," he thought.
(Bang--Crash!)... "She'll _have_ to move! Suppose Eleanor took it into
her head to hunt her up? She's capable of it!" (Crash!)

Eleanor's absorption in the cook she could not find kept her for nearly
forty-eight hours from speculation as to what, if not office business,
took Maurice to Medfield. When she did begin to speculate she said to
herself, "He doesn't tell me things about his business!" Then she was
stabbed again by his annoyance because she had opened the letter from
Mr. Houghton; then by his secretiveness in regard to that adventure on
the river with Mrs. Morton. (He had told Edith!) Then this--then
that--and by and by a tiny heap of nothings, that implied reserves. He
wasn't confidential. She told him _everything_! She never kept a thing
from him! And he didn't even tell her why he was over in Medfield when
no real-estate matter