out Truth! They
say nowadays hardly any rich people tell the truth. And talking grammar
to him! You set him against me," she, said, and her eyes filled with
angry tears.

"I wouldn't think of setting him against you," he said; "only, I want to
do my duty to him."

"'Duty'!" said Lily, contemptuously; "I'm not going to bring him up
old-fashioned. And this thing of telling him not to say 'ain't,' _I_ say
it, and what else would he say? There ain't any other word. He's my
child--and I'll bring him up the way I like! Wait; I'll give you some
fudge; I've just made it..."

Maurice, now, on his way up to Green Hill, looking out of the car
window, and remembering interviews like this with his son's mother,
wondered if Edith had seen Lily the day she took Jacky home? That made
him wonder what Edith would think of the whole business? To a woman like
Edith it would be simply disgusting. "I'll just drop out of her life,"
he said. He thought of the day he brought Jacky to Mrs. Newbolt's door,
and Edith had looked at him--and then at Jacky--and then at him again.
_She understood!_ Would she understand now? Probably not. "Of course old
Johnny'll get her ... But, oh, what life might have been!"

Edith had driven over to the junction earlier than was necessary,
because she had wanted to get away from her father and mother. "They are
afraid he'll fall in love with me," she thought, hotly; "if he ever
does, nothing they can say shall separate us. Nothing! But mother'll try
to influence him to marry that dreadful creature, and father will say
things about 'honor,' so he'll feel he ought never to marry--anybody.
Oh, they are lambs," she said, setting her teeth; "but they mustn't keep
Maurice from being happy!" At the station, as she sat in the buggy
flecking her whip idly, and waiting for Maurice's train, her whole mind
was on the defensive. "He has a right to be happy. He has a right to
marry again ... but they needn't worry about _me_!" she thought. "I've
never grown up to Maurice. But whatever happens, he shan't marry that
woman!"

When Maurice got off the train there was a blank moment when she did not
recognize him. As a careworn man came up to her with an outstretched
hand and a friendly, "This is awfully nice in you, Skeezics!" she said,
with a gasp, "_Maurice!_" He had aged so that he looked, she thought, as
old as Eleanor. But they were both laboriously casual, until the usual
remarks upon the weather, and the change in the t