, the trying to talk of Eleanor, and thunderstorms, while you
hold eight nails between your lips; then the pause while Edith climbs
down the ladder and runs to the kitchen for hot cookies; all these
things would be a delightful occupation for any intelligent person!

"It'll take three mornings to do it," Edith said, importantly; and
Maurice said:

"It will, because you keep putting the wrong end up! I wish Eleanor was
well enough to do it," he said--and then burst into self-derisive
chuckles: "Imagine Eleanor straddling that ridgepole! It would scare her
stiff!"

It was after this talk that Maurice "backed out" on the job--but Edith
never knew why. She saw no connection between the unfinished roof, and
the fact that that same afternoon, sitting on the floor in the Bride's
room, she had, in her anxiety to be entertaining, repeated Maurice's
remark about the ridgepole. Eleanor, who had had an empty morning,
listening to the distant tapping of hammers, had drooped a weary lip.

"I should hate it. Horrid, dirty work!"

"Oh no! It's nice, clean work," Edith corrected her.

"But _you_ wouldn't like it, of course," she said, with satisfaction;
"you'd be scared! You're scared of everything, Maurice says. You were
scared to death, up on the mountain."

Eleanor was silent.

"He thinks it's lovely for you to be scared; it's funny about Maurice,"
said Edith, thoughtfully; "he doesn't like it when _I'm_ scared--not
that I ever am, now, but I used to be when I was a child."

The color flickered on Eleanor's cheeks: "Edith, I'll rest now," she
said; her voice broke.

Edith looked at her, open-mouthed. "Why, Eleanor!" she said; "what's the
matter? Are you mad at anything? Have you a stomachache? I'll run for
mother!"

"There's nothing the matter. But--but I wish you'd tell Maurice to come
and speak to me."

Edith tore downstairs, and out of the front door: "Maurice! Where are
you?"--then, catching sight of him, reading and smoking in a hammock
slung between two of the big columns on the east porch, she rushed at
him, and pulled him to his astonished feet. "Eleanor wants you!
Something's the matter, and--"

Before she could finish, Maurice was tearing upstairs, two steps at a
time....

And so it was that Edith, sulkily, worked on the roof by herself.

Yet Maurice had not entirely "backed out." ... The very next morning,
before Edith was awake, he had gone out to the henhouse, and, alone,
done more than his share of t