mself, "her hair on her shoulders that day on the lawn was like a
nimbus around the head of a saint. How she'd hate that word 'saint'!").
His chuckle made one of the Greenleaf heirs think that Weston's
representative was a good sort;--"pleasant fellow!" But Maurice,
looking "pleasant," was thinking: "I'd about sell my soul to kiss her
hair ... Oh, I _must_ stop this kind of thing! I swear it's worse than
the Lily and Jacky business...." Then he signed a deed, and the
Greenleaf people felt they had made a good thing of it--but Maurice's
telegram that the deed was signed, caused rejoicing in the Weston
office! "Curtis got ahead of 'em!" said Mr. Weston. While he was
writing that triumphant telegram Maurice was wondering: "Was John
Bennett a complete idiot? ... If things had been different would Edith
have ... cared?" For himself, he, personally, didn't care "a damn,"
whether Weston got ahead of Greenleaf or Greenleaf beat Weston. His own
affairs engrossed him: "my job," he was telling himself, "is to see that
Eleanor doesn't suffer any more, poor girl! And Edith shall never know.
And I'll make a decent man of Jacky--not a fool, like his father." So he
wrote his victorious dispatch, and the Weston office congratulated
itself.

Maurice had been very grateful for his fortnight of absence from
everybody, except the Greenleaf heirs; grateful for a solitude of trains
and lawyers' offices. Because, in solitude, he could, with entirely
hopeless courage, face the future. He was facing it unswervingly the day
he reached Chicago, where he was to get some final signatures; he came
into the warm lobby of the hotel, glad to escape the rampaging lake
wind, and while he was registering the hotel clerk produced the
telegrams which had been held for him. The first, from Mr. Weston, "Drop
Greenleaf," bewildered him until he read the other, "Eleanor has had an
accident." Then he ran his pen through his name, asked for a time-table,
and sent a peremptory wire to Mrs. Newbolt saying that he was on his way
home, and asking that full particulars be telegraphed to him at a
certain point on his journey. "Let me know just what happened, and how
she is," he telegraphed. "It must be serious," he thought, "to send for
me!"

It was hardly an hour before he was on a train for another day of
travel, during which he experienced the irritation common to all of us
when we receive an alarming dispatch, devoid of details. "Economizing on
ten cents! What kin