melancholy and silent than usual, a little more devoted to old Bingo,
did not attract his attention in any way. But when Edith came in on the
following Sunday, he had his wife sufficiently on his mind to say, in a
quick aside:

"Edith, don't give me away on being sort of upset last Sunday night,
will you?" (As he spoke, he remembered that swift kiss. "Nice little
Skeezics!" he thought.) But he finished his sentence with perfect
matter-of-factness: "it was just a--a little personal worry. I don't
want Eleanor bothered, you understand?"

"Of course," said Edith, gravely

And so it was that in another month or two, with reliance upon Edith's
discretion, and satisfaction in a recovering Jacky, the track of the
tornado in Maurice's mind was quite covered up with the old, ugly,
commonplace of furtive security. In the security Maurice was conscious,
in a kindly way, that poor old Eleanor looked pretty seedy; so he
brought her some flowers once in a while; not as often as he would have
liked to, for, though he had more money now, eight weeks of a private
room in a hospital "kind o' makes a dent in your income," Maurice told
himself; "but I don't begrudge it," he thought; "I'm glad the kid got
well."

So, after that night of terror and turmoil,--when Eleanor had
fainted--Maurice's life in his own house settled again into the old
tranquil forlornness, enlivened only by those Sunday-afternoon visits
from Edith.

And Eleanor?... There had been some dumb days, when she moved about the
house or sat opposite Maurice at table, or exercised Bingo, like an
automaton. Sometimes she sat at her window, looking down through the
bare branches of the poplar at the still, wintry garden; the painted
table, heaped with grimy snow slowly melting in the chill March
sunshine; the dead stalks of the lilies on each side of the icy bricks
of the path; the rusty bars of the iron gate, through which, now and
then, came the glimmer, a block away, of the river--"their river"!
Sometimes for an hour her mind numbly considered these things; then
would come a fierce throb of pain: "He was all the time saying he
'couldn't afford' things; that was so he could give her money, I
suppose?" Then blank listlessness again. She did not suffer very much.
She was too stunned to suffer. She merely said to herself, vaguely,
"I'll leave him." It may have been on the third day that, when she said,
"I will leave him; he has been false to me," her mind whispered back,