anners, for
instance. He hasn't any. Or grammar; I told him not to say 'ain't,' and,
if you please! he told his mother _she_ mustn't say it! Lily got on her
ear."

She smiled faintly. "I wish I could see him," she said.

She had urged this more than once, but it had not seemed practicable. "I
can't bring him here," Maurice explained; "he'd blurt out to Lily where
he'd been, and she'd get uneasy. Even as it is, I live in dread that
she'll pack up and clear out with him."

"She _shan't_ take him away!" Eleanor said; she was eager again;--after
all, Edith, for all her impertinence in advising Maurice how to treat
his wife!--Edith could not break in upon an intimacy like this!

Her incessant talk about Jacky (which might have bored Maurice just a
little, if it had not touched him) gave her, in some subtle, spiritual
way, a sense of approaching motherhood: _she made preparations_! She
planned little gifts for him;--Maurice had told her of Jacky's lively
interest in benefits to come; once, she thought, "I suppose he's too old
to have one of those funny papers in his room? I saw such a pretty one
to-day, little rabbits in trousers!"--For by this time she had
determined that, somehow, she would get possession of him! In these
maternal moments she feared no rivalry from Edith Houghton. Jacky would
save her from Edith!

"Oh, Maurice! I _must_ see him," she said once.

"I'll fix it so you can," he told her. But it was two months before he
was able to fix it; then "Forepaws" came to town, and the way was clear!
He would take Jacky, and Eleanor should go and have a seat near by, and
come up and speak to the youngster, as any admiring stranger might, and,
indeed, often did, for Jacky was a striking child--his eyes blue and
keen, his skin very clear, and his cheeks glowing with health. "If he
goes home and tells Lily a lady spoke to him," Maurice said, "she won't
think anything of it."

"May I give him some candy?"

"No; he has too much of it as it is; get one of those tin horns for him.
He'll raise Cain for Lily, I suppose; but we won't have to listen to
him!" (That "we" so fed Eleanor's starved soul, that she thought of
Edith Houghton with a sort of gay contempt: "_I'm_ not afraid of her!")

The plan for seeing Jacky went through easily enough. "I'll take that
boy of yours to the circus," Maurice told Lily, carelessly, one day.

"Why, that's awful kind in you, Mr. Curtis; but ain't you afraid
somebody'll see you luggin'