rown?" she inquired. "Henry, Maurice
looks troubled. What do you suppose is the matter?"

"He does look seedy," he agreed; "poke about and find out what's wrong.
You can do it better if your inelegant offspring isn't around, and if
I'm not there, either. He won't open his lips to me! I think it's money.
He's carrying a pretty heavy load. But he never peeps.... I wish he
wouldn't economize on cigars, though; he offered me one yesterday, and
politeness compelled me to smoke it!"

"'Peeps'!" said Edith; "how elegant!"

So that was how it happened that Mary Houghton went alone to dine with
Maurice and Eleanor. But she couldn't discover, in Maurice's talk or
Eleanor's silences, any hint of financial anxiety. "So," she said to
herself, "it isn't money that worries him." When he walked back with her
to the hotel after dinner, he was thinking, "She'd know what to do about
Jacky." But of course he couldn't ask her what to do! He could never ask
anybody--except, perhaps, Mr. Houghton; and what would he, an old man,
know about bringing up a little boy? He was listening, not very closely,
to Mrs. Houghton's talk of the Custom House; but when she said, "John
Bennett met us on the dock," he was suddenly attentive.

"Has Edith--?" he began.

She laughed ruefully. "No. Young people are not what they were in my
day. Edith is not a bit sentimental."

Maurice was silent. When they reached the hotel, they went upstairs into
a vast, bleak parlor, and steered their way among enormous plush
armchairs to a sofa. A few electric bulbs, glaring among the glass
prisms of a remote chandelier, made a dim light--but not too dim for
Mary Houghton to see that Maurice's face was drawn and worried;
involuntarily she said:

"You dear boy, I wish you didn't look so careworn!"

"I'm bothered about something," he said.

"Your uncle Henry told me to 'poke around,' and see if you were troubled
about money?" she said, smiling.

"Oh, not especially. I'm always more or less strapped. But money isn't
worth bothering about, really."

"If you 'consider the stars,' you will find very few things are worth
bothering about! Except, of course, wrongdoing."

And, to his own astonishment, he found himself saying, "I'm afraid
that's where I come in!" As he spoke, he remembered that night of the
eclipse--oh, those moon-washed depths, those stupendous serenities of
Law and Beauty which, together, are Truth! How passionately he had
desired Truth. And now Mrs. Ho