"Oh," said Maurice, "yes; thank you." He was saying to himself, "I might have known this kind of thing would happen!" He was consumed with anxiety to ask Edith some questions, but of course he had to be silent.

To show even the slightest interest was impossible--and Edith volunteered no further information, for that night Eleanor took occasion to intimate to her that "Mrs. Dale" must not be referred to. "You can't speak of that kind of person, you know."

"Why not?" Edith said.

"Well, she isn't--nice. She wasn't married. And Edith, it really isn't good taste to tell a man, right to his face, that he's handsome! I don't think any man likes flattery."

"You mean because I said Maurice was handsome? I didn't say it to his face--he was in the library. And it isn't flattery to tell the truth. He is! As for Mrs. Dale, she _is_ married; this little Jacky was her baby!

She said so. He had the bluest eyes! I never saw such blue eyes--except Maurice's. 'Course she's not a lady; but I don't see what right you have to say she isn't nice."

Eleanor, laughing, threw up despairing hands; "Edith, don't you know _anything_?"

"I know _everything_," Edith said, affronted; "I'm sixteen. Of course I know what you mean; but Mrs. Dale isn't--that. And," Edith ended, on the spur of the moment, "and I'm going to see her sometime!" The under dog always appealed to Edith Houghton, and when Eleanor left her, appalled by her failure to instill proprieties into her, Edith was distinctly hot. "I'm not going to see her!" she told herself. "I wouldn't think of such a thing. But I won't listen to Eleanor abusing her."

As for Eleanor, she confided her alarm to Maurice. "She mustn't go to see that woman!"

His instant horrified agreement was a satisfaction to her: "Of _course_ not!"

"She won't listen to _me_," Eleanor complained; "you'll have to tell her she mustn't."

"I will," he said, grimly.

And the very next day he did. He happened (as it seemed) to start for his office just as Edith started for school, so they walked along together.

"Edith," he said, the moment they were clear of his own doorway and Eleanor's ears; "that Mrs. Dale; I'd keep away from her, if I were you."

"Goodness!" said Edith; "did you suppose I was going to fall into her arms? Why should I have anything to do with her?"

"Eleanor said you said--"

"Oh, I just said that because Eleanor was down on her, and that made me mad. I couldn't go and see her, if I was dying to--'cause I don't know where she lives--unless it was that house she was going into? Do you know, Maurice?"

"Great Scott! How should I know where she lives?"

"'Course not," said Edith.

But it was many days before Maurice's alarm quieted down sufficiently to let him drift back into the furtive security of knowing that neither Edith nor Eleanor could, by any possibility, get on Lily's track. "And, besides, Lily's too good a sport to give anything away. Pretty neat in her to 'forget' that coat! But she ought to be careful not to forget her husband's name!--it seems to be Henry, now."

CHAPTER XV

A moody Maurice, who puzzled her, and a faultfinding Eleanor, whom she was too generous to understand, drove the sixteen-year-old Edith into a real appreciation of Johnny Bennett. With him, she was still in the stage of unsentimental frankness that pierced ruthlessly to what she conceived to be the realities; and because she was as unselfconscious as a tree, she was entirely indifferent to the fact that Johnny was a boy and she was a girl, Johnny, however, nearsighted and in enormous sh.e.l.l-rimmed spectacles, and still inarticulate, was quite aware of it; more definitely so every week,--for he saw her on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays.

"And it's the greatest possible relief to talk to you!" Edith told him.

Johnny accepted the tribute as his due. They had been coasting, and now, on the hilltop, were sitting on their sleds, resting. "Gosh! it's hot!"

Johnny said: he had taken off his red sweater and tied its sleeves around his neck; "zero? You try pulling both those sleds up here, and you'll think it's the Fourth of July," Johnny said, adjusting his spectacles with a mittened hand. He frequently reverted to the grumpy stage--yet now, looking at Edith, grumpiness vanished. She was breathless from the long climb, and her white teeth showed between her parted, panting lips: her cheeks were burning with frosty pink. Johnny looked, and looked away, and sighed.

"Johnny," Edith said, "why do you suppose Eleanor gives me so many call-downs? 'Course I hate music; and once I said she was always pounding on the piano--and she didn't seem to like it!" Edith was genuinely puzzled. "I can't understand Eleanor," she said; "she makes me tired."

"I should think she'd make Maurice tired!" Johnny said, and added: "That's the worst of getting married. I shall never marry."

"When I was a child," Edith said, "I always said that when I grew up I was going to marry Maurice, because he was just like Sir Walter Raleigh.

Wasn't that a joke?"

Johnny saw nothing amusing in such foolishness; he said that Maurice was old enough to be her father! As for himself, he felt, he said, that marriage was a mistake. "Women hamper a man dreadfully. Still--I may marry," Johnny conceded; "but it will be somebody very young, so I can train her mind. I want a woman (if I decide to marry) to be just the kind I want. Otherwise, you get hung up with Eleanors."

Edith lifted her chin. "Well, I like that! Why shouldn't she train your mind?"

"Because," Johnny said, firmly, "the man's mind is the stronger."

Edith screamed with laughter, and threw a handful of snow in his neck.

"B-r-r-r!" she said; "it's getting cold! I'll knock the spots out of you on belly b.u.mps!" She got on her feet, shook the snow from the edge of her skirt, flung herself face down on her sled, and shot like a blue comet over the icy slope. Johnny sped after her, his big sled taking flying leaps over the kiss-me-quicks. They reached the bottom of the hill almost together, and Johnny, looking at her standing there, breathless and rosy, with shining eyes which were as impersonal as stars, said to himself, with emotion:

"She's got sense--for a girl." His heart was pounding in his broad chest, but he couldn't think of a thing to say. He was still dumb when she said good-by to him at Maurice's door.

"Why don't you come to dinner next Sat.u.r.day?" she said, carelessly; "Maurice will be away all week on business; but he'll be back Sat.u.r.day."

Johnny mumbled something to the effect that he could survive, even if Maurice wasn't back.

"I couldn't," Edith said. "I should simply die, in this house, if it wasn't for Maurice!"

As, whistling, she ran upstairs, Edith thought to herself that Johnny was a _lamb_! "But, compared to Maurice, he's awfully uninteresting."

Edith, openly and audibly, compared every male creature to Maurice, and none of them ever measured up to him! His very moodiness had its charm; when he sat down at the piano after dinner and scowled over some new music, or when he lounged in his big chair and smoked, his face absorbed to the point of sternness, Edith, loving him "next to father and mother," watched him, and wondered what he was thinking about? Sometimes he came out of his abstraction and teased her, and then she sparkled into gay impertinences; sometimes he asked her what she thought of this or that phrasing, "...though you are a barbarian, Skeezics, about music"; sometimes he would pull a book from the shelf over his desk and read a poem to her; and he was really interested in her opinion,--ardently appreciative if he liked the poem; if he didn't, it was "the limit."

Maurice was at home that Sat.u.r.day night for which Edith had thrown the careless invitation to Johnny; and Mrs. Newbolt also dropped in to dinner. It was not a pleasant dinner. Eleanor sat in one of her empty silences; saw Maurice frown at an overdone leg of lamb; heard her aunt's stream of comments on her housekeeping; listened to Edith's teasing chatter to Johnny;--"What _can_ Maurice see in her!" She thought.

Before dinner was over, she excused herself; she had a headache, she said. "You won't mind, Auntie, will you?"

Mrs. Newbolt said, heartily, "_Not_ a bit! My dear mother used to--"

Eleanor, picking up little Bingo, went with lagging step out of the room.

"Children," said Mrs. Newbolt, "why don't you make taffy this evening?"

"_That's_ sense," said Edith; "let's! It's Mary's night out. Sorry poor old Eleanor isn't up to it."

Maurice frowned; "Look here, Edith, that isn't--respectful."

Edith looked so blankly astonished that Mrs. Newbolt defended her: "But Eleanor _does_ look old! And she'll lose her figger if she isn't careful! My dear grandmother--used to say, 'Girls, I'd rather have you lose your vir--'"

"Don't raise Cain in the kitchen, you two," Maurice said, hastily; "Eleanor hates noise."

Edith, subdued by his rebuke, said she wouldn't raise Cain; and, indeed, she and Johnny were preternaturally quiet until things had been cleared away and the taffy could be started. When it was on the stove, there was at least ten minutes of whispering while they watched the black mola.s.ses shimmer into the first yellow rings. Then Johnny, in a low voice, talked for a good while of something he called "Philosophy"--which seemed to consist in a profound disbelief in everything. "Take religion," said Johnny. "I'd like to discuss it with you; I think you have a very good mind--for a woman. Religion is an ill.u.s.tration of what I mean. It's a delusion. A complete delusion. I have ceased to believe in anything."

"Oh, Johnny, how awful!" said Edith, stirring the seething sweetness; "Johnny, be a lamb, and get me a tumbler of cold water, will you, to try this stuff?"

Johnny brought the water ("Oh, how young she is!" he thought), and Edith poured a trickle of taffy into it.