no, she couldn't manage it; "I--I can't leave Bingo"
(she was hunting for an excuse not to leave Maurice), "Bingo is so
miserable if I am out of his sight."

"You can take him,--old Rover's gone to heaven. Think you can start
to-morrow?" He sat down beside her and took her hand in his warm young
paw; the pity of her made him frown--pity, and an intolerable annoyance
at himself! She, a woman twice his age, had married him, when, of
course, she ought to have told him not to be a little fool; "...wiped my
nose and sent me home!" he thought, with cynical humor. But, all the
same, she loved him. And he had played her a damned cheap trick!--which
was hidden safely away in the two-family house on Ash Street. "Hidden."
What a detestable word! It flashed into Maurice's mind that if, that
night among the stars, he had made a clean breast of it all to Eleanor,
he wouldn't now be going through this business of hiding things--and
covering them up by innumerable, squalid little falsenesses. "There
would have been a bust-up, and she might have left me. But that would
have been the end of it!" he thought; he would have been _free_ from
what he had once compared to a dead hen tied around a dog's neck--the
clinging corruption of a lie! The Truth would have made him free. Aloud,
he said, "Star,"--she caught her breath at the old lovely word--"I'll go
to Green Hill with you, and take care of you for a few days. I'm sure I
can fix it up at the office."

The tears leaped to her eyes. "Oh, Maurice!" she said; "I haven't been
nice to you. I'm afraid I'm--rather temperamental. I--I get to fancying
things. One day last week I--had horrid thoughts about you."

"About _me_?" he said, laughing; "well, no doubt I deserved 'em!"

"No!" she said, passionately; "no--you didn't! I know you didn't. But
I--" With the melody of that old name in her ears, her thoughts were
too shameful to be confessed. She wouldn't tell him how she had wronged
him in her mind; she would just say: "Don't keep things from me,
darling! Be frank with me, Maurice. And--" she stopped and tried to
laugh, but her mournful eyes dredged his to find an indorsement of her
own certainties--"and tell me you don't love anybody else?"

She held her breath for his answer:

"You _bet_ I don't!"

The humor of such a question almost made him laugh. In his own mind he
was saying, "Lily, and _Love_? Good Lord!"

Eleanor, putting her hand on his, said, in a whisper, "But we have no
child