happy again before he knew it. After the work was over they had a
lazy hour before the fire, their eyes stinging with smoke which seemed
to envelop them, no matter on which side they sat; an hour in which
Rover drowsed at Maurice's feet, and Johnny, in spectacles, read _A
Boy's Adventures in the Forests of Brazil_, and Edith gabbled about
Eleanor....

"Oh, I wish _I_ was married," Edith said; "I'd just love to save my
husband's life!"

Maurice said little, except to ask Johnny if he had got to such and such
a place in the _Adventures_, or to assent to Edith's ecstasies; but once
he sighed, and said Eleanor was awfully pulled down by that--that night.

"I should think," Edith said, "you'd feel she'd just about died for you,
like people in history who died for each other."

"I do," Maurice said, soberly.

When they drove home in the dusk, Maurice singing, loudly; Edith, on the
front seat of the wagon, snuggling against him; Johnny standing up,
balancing himself by holding on to their shoulders, and old Rover
jogging along on the footpath,--they were all in great spirits, until a
turn in the road showed them Eleanor, sitting on a log, looking rather
white.

"Suffering snakes!" said Maurice, breaking off in the middle of a word.
Before Lion could quite stop, he was at his wife's side. "Eleanor! How
did you get here? ... You _walked_? Oh, Star, you oughtn't to have done
such a thing!"

"I was frightened about you. It was so late. I was afraid something had
happened. I came to look for you."

Edith and Johnny looked on aghast; then Edith called out: "Why, Eleanor!
I wouldn't let anything happen to Maurice!"

Maurice, kneeling beside his wife, had put his arms around her and was
soothing her with all sorts of gentlenesses: "Dear, you mustn't worry
so! Nelly, don't cry; why, darling, we were having such a good time, we
never noticed that it was getting late ..."

"You forgot me," Eleanor said; "as long as you had Edith, you never
thought how I might worry!" She hid her face in her hands.

Maurice came back to the wagon; "Edith," he said, in a low voice, "would
you and Johnny mind getting out and walking? I'll bring Eleanor along
later. I'm sorry, but she's--she's tired."

Edith said in a whisper, "'Course not!" Then, without a look behind her
at the crying woman on the log, and the patient, mortified boy bending
over her, she, and the disgusted and more deliberate Johnny, ran down
the road into the twilight. Edit