e wouldn't.
Lily slapped him, and said, "Mr. Curtis will give you a present if
you're on time every morning!"

She told Maurice to what she had committed him: "You see, I'm bound to
educate him, and make a gentleman of him, so he can have an automobile,
and marry a society girl. No chippy is going to get Jacky--smoking
cigarettes, and saying 'La! La!' to any man that comes along. I hate
those cheap girls. Look at the paint on 'em. I don't see how they have
the face to show themselves on the street! Well, _I_ can't make him
prompt at school; but he'll be Johnny-on-the-spot if you say so. My soul
and body, he'll do anything for you! He's saved up all his prayer money
and bought a lot of chewing gum for you."

"Great Scott!" said Maurice, appalled at the experimental obligations
which his son's gift might involve.

"So I told him that next winter you'd give him a box of candy every
Saturday if he was on time all the week. I ain't asking you to go to
any expense," she pleaded; "I'll buy the candy. But you promise him--"

"I'll promise him a spanking if he's _not_ on time, once," Maurice
retorted; "for Heaven's sake, Lily, let up on spoiling him!"

At which Lily said: "He's my boy! I guess I know how to bring him up!"

Maurice, the next morning, looking across his breakfast table at Eleanor
and remembering this remark, said to himself: "Lily needn't worry; I
don't want him--and I couldn't have him if I did! But what _is_ going to
become of him?"

His new, slowly awakening sense of responsibility expressed itself in
this unanswerable question, which irritated his mind as a splinter might
have irritated his flesh. He thought of it constantly--thought of it
when Eleanor sang (with a slurred note once or twice), "O sweet, O sweet
content!" Thought of it when his conscience reminded him that he must
have tea with her in the garden under the poplar on Sunday afternoons.
Thought of it when he and she went up to the Houghtons', to spend Labor
Day (she would not go without him!). Perhaps the thing that gave him
some moments of forgetfulness was a quite different irritation which he
felt when, on reaching Green Hill, he discovered that John Bennett, too,
was spending Labor Day in the mountains. Johnny had come he said, to see
his father.... "I wouldn't have known it if he hadn't mentioned it!"
said Doctor Bennett; for, Johnny practically lived at the Houghtons',
where Edith was so painstakingly kind to him that he was a good de