ardly spoke all the way back to the house. But not
because of "poor old Johnny"! She was absorbed by that intuition--which
she did not, she told herself, believe. Yet it clamored in her mind:
Maurice had done something wrong. Something so wrong, that he couldn't
speak of it, even to her! Then it must be--? "No! _that's_ impossible!"
But with this recoil from a disgusting impossibility, came an upsurge of
something she had never felt in her life--something not unlike that
emotion she had once called Bingoism--a resentful consciousness that
Maurice had not been as completely and confidentially her friend as she
was his!

But Edith hadn't a mean fiber in her! Instantly, on the heels of that
small pain came a greater and nobler pain: "I can't bear it if he has
done anything wrong! But if he has, it's some wicked woman's fault." As
she said that, anger at an injury done to Maurice made her almost forget
that first virginal repulsion--and made her entirely forget that
fleeting pain of knowing that she had not meant as much to him as he
meant to her! "But he _hasn't_ done anything wrong," she insisted; "he
wouldn't look at a horrid? woman!"

"For Heaven's sake, Edith," Maurice remonstrated; "this isn't any
Marathon! Go slow. I'm not in any hurry to get home."

"I am," Edith said, briefly. She was in a great hurry! She wanted to be
alone, and argue to herself that she had been guilty of a dreadful
disloyalty to him.... "Maurice? Why! He would be the last man in the
world to--to do _that_,--darling old Maurice! He has simply had a crush
on somebody, and likes her better than he likes Eleanor--or me; but
_that's_ nothing. Eleanor deserves it; and very likely I do, too! But
he's so frightfully honorable about Eleanor--he's a perfect crank on
honor!--that he blames himself for even that." By this time the
possibility that the unknown somebody was "horrid" had become
unthinkable; she was probably terribly attractive, and Maurice had a
crush on ... "though, of course, she can't be really nice," Edith
thought; "Maurice simply doesn't see through her. Boys are so stupid!
They don't know girls," Again there was a Bingo moment of hot dislike
for the "girl," whoever she was!--and she walked faster and faster.

Maurice, striding along beside her, was thinking of the irony of the
"bouquet" she had thrown at him, and the innocence of that "Tell
Eleanor"! "What a child she is still! And she's not in love with
Johnny--" He didn't understan