that was only for a moment; "Edith's not that kind of a girl. And,
anyway, she'd never think of such a thing of me--which makes me all the
more rotten!" So he clutched at Edith's undeserved faith in him, and
said, "She'll never think of _that_." Still, she was grown up ... and he
mustn't touch her. (This was one of the times when he was not worrying
about Jacky!)

Edith, talking animatedly of primroses, had her absorbing thoughts, too;
they were nothing but furious denial! "Maurice--horrid? Never!" Then, on
the very breath of "Never," came again the insistent reminder: "But he
could tell _me_ anything, except--" So, thinking of just one thing, and
talking of many other things, she walked up and down the primrose path
with Maurice. They neither of them wanted to go back to the three older
people: the father and mother--and wife.

Eleanor, on the porch, strained her eyes into the dusk; now and then she
caught a glimmer of the dim whiteness of Edith's skirt, or heard
Maurice's voice. She was suffering so that by and by she said, briefly,
to her hosts--her trembling with unshed tears--"Good night," and went
upstairs, alone--an old, crying woman. Eleanor had been unreasonable
many times; but this time she was not unreasonable! That night anyone
could have seen that she was, to Maurice, as nonexistent as any other
elderly woman might have been. The Houghtons saw it, and when she went
into the house Mary Houghton said, with distress:

"She suffers!"

Her husband nodded, and said he wished he was asleep. "Why," he
demanded, "are women greater fools about this business than men? Poor
Maurice ventures to talk to Edith of 'shoes and ships and sealing
wax,'--and Eleanor weeps! Why are there more jealous women than men?"

"Because," Mary Houghton said, dryly, "more men give cause for jealousy
than women."

"_Touche! Touche!_" he conceded; then added, quickly, "But Maurice isn't
giving any cause."

"Well, I'm not so sure," she said.

Up in her own room, Eleanor, sitting in the dark by the open window,
stared out into the leafy silence of the night. Once, down in the
garden, Maurice laughed;--and she struck her clenched hand on her
forehead:

"I can't bear it!" she said, gaspingly, aloud; "I can't bear it--_she
interests him_!" His pleasure in Edith's mind was a more scorching pain
to her than the thought of Lily's body....

Later, when Maurice and Edith came up from the garden darkness, they
found a deserted porch. "Let'