y push you into the very thing they are afraid of, because
they bore you so infernally? If I look at a woman, Eleanor's on her
ear.... Queer," he pondered; "she's good. Look how kind she is to old
O'Brien's lame child. And she _can_ sing." He hummed to himself a lovely
Lilting line of one of Eleanor's songs. "Confound it! why did I meet
Lily? Eleanor is a million times too good for me...."

Far off he heard a sound and, frowning, looked toward the road: yes;
somebody was coming! "Can't a man get a minute to himself?" Maurice
thought, despairingly. It was the mild-eyed and spectacled Johnny
Bennett, and behind him, Edith, panting and perspiring, and smiling
broadly.

"Hello!" she called out, in cheerful gasps; "thought we'd come up and
walk home with you!"

"'Lo," Maurice said.

The boy and girl achieving the rocky knoll on which Maurice was sitting,
his hands locked about his knees, his eyes angry and ashamed, staring
over the treetops, sat down beside him. Johnny pulled out his pipe, and
Edith took off her hat and fanned herself. "Mother and Eleanor went for
a ride. I thought I'd rather come up here."

"Um--" Maurice said.

"Two letters for you," she said. "Eleanor told me to bring 'em up. Might
be business."

As she handed them to him, his eye caught the address on one of them,
and a little cold tingle suddenly ran down his spine. Lily had never
written to him, but some instinct warned him that that cramped
handwriting on the narrow lavender envelope, forwarded from the office,
could only be hers. A whiff of perfumery made him sure. He had a pang of
fright. At what? He could not have said; but even before he opened the
purple envelope he knew the taste of fear in his mouth....

Sitting there on the mountain, looking down into the misty serenities of
the sun-drenched valley, with the smoke of Johnny Bennett's pipe in his
nostrils, and the friendly Edith beside him, he tore open the scented
envelope, and as his eyes fell on the first lines it seemed as if the
spreading world below rose up and hit him in the face:

DEAR FRIEND CURT,--I don't know what you'll say. I hope you won't be
mad. I'm going to have a baby. _It's yours_....

Maurice could not see the page, a wave of nausea swamped even his
horror; he swallowed--swallowed--swallowed. Edith heard him gasp, and
looked at him, much interested.

"What's the matter with your hands?" Edith inquired. "Johnny! Look at
his hands!"

Maurice's fingers, smoothin