ith had never said
that Eleanor was "silly"! But so long as it bothered Eleanor (being
nervous) to have the imp round, he'd tell her not to be a nuisance. "You
can say anything to Skeezics; she has sense. She understands."

But all the same, Maurice shingled his part of the henhouse before
breakfast.

Maurice did not call Eleanor "silly" again for a long time. There was
always--when she was unreasonable--the curbing memory that her
reasonableness had been shaken by that assault of darkness and fear, and
the terrible fatigue of saving his robust young life. Furthermore,
Doctor Bennett--telling Henry Houghton that Eleanor had done the worst
possible thing, "magnificently"--told Maurice she had "nervous
prostration,"--a cloaking phrase which kindly doctors often give to
perplexed husbands, so that the egotism of sickly wives may be covered
up! So Maurice, repeating to himself these useful words, saw only ill
health, not silliness, in Eleanor's occasional tears. It was a week
after the shingling of the henhouse, that, leaving her to recuperate
still further at Green Hill, he started in on his job of "office
boy"--his jocose title for his position in the real-estate office in
Mercer. Eleanor did not want to be left, and said so, wistfully.

"I'll come up for Sundays," Maurice comforted her, tenderly.

On these weekly visits the Houghtons were impressed by his tenderness;
he played solitaire with his wife by the hour; he read poetry to her
until she fell asleep; and he told her everything he had done and every
person he had seen, while he was away from her! But the rest of the
household didn't get much enjoyment out of Eleanor. Even the adoring
Edith had moments when admiration had to be propped up by Doctor
Bennett's phrase. As, for instance, on one of Maurice's precious
Sundays, he and she and Johnny Bennett and Rover and old Lion climbed up
to the cabin to make things shipshape before closing the place for the
winter.

"You'll be away from me all day," Eleanor said, and her eyes filled.

Maurice said he hated to leave her, but he had always helped Edith on
this closing-up job.

"Oh, well; go, if you want to," Eleanor said; "but I don't see how you
can enjoy being with a perfect child, like Edith!"

Maurice went--not very happily. But it was such a fine, tingling day of
hard work, in a joyous wind, with resulting appetites, and much yelling
at each other--"Here, drop that!" ... "Hurry up, slow poke!"--that he
was