ies of Truth, and leads to that orderly freedom of the
stars to which Maurice had once aspired! So now the boy was going back
to Mercer to plunge into the pitfalls and limitless shades of
concealment. He did it with a hard purpose of endurance, without hope,
and also without complaint.

"If I can just avoid out-and-out lying," he told himself, "I can take my
medicine. But if I have to lie--!"

He knew the full bitterness of his medicine when he went to see Lily...

He went the very next day, after office hours... There had been a
temptation to postpone the taking of the medicine, because it had been
difficult to escape from Eleanor. The well-ordered household at Green
Hill had fired her with an impulse to try housekeeping again, and she
wanted to urge the idea upon Maurice:

"We would be so much more comfortable; and I could have little Bingo!"

"We can't afford it," he said. (Oh, how many things he wouldn't be able
to afford, now!)

"It wouldn't cost much more. I'll come down to the office this afternoon
and walk home with you, and tell you what I've thought out about it."

Maurice said he had to--to go and see an apartment house at five.

"That's no matter! I'll meet you and walk along with you."

"I have several other places to go."

That hurt her. "If you don't want me--"

He was so absorbed that her words had no meaning to him. "Good-by," he
said, mechanically--and the next moment he was on his way.

At the office his employer gave him a keen glance. "You look used up,
Curtis; got a cold?" Mr. Weston asked, kindly.

Maurice, sick in spirit, said, "No, sir; I'm all right."

And so the minutes of the long day ticked themselves away, each a
separate pang of disgust and shame, until five o'clock came, and he
started for Lily's.

While he waited in the unswept vestibule of an incredibly ornate frame
apartment house for the answer to his ring, and the usual: "My goodness!
Is that you? Come on up!" he had the feeling of one who stands at a
closed door, knowing that when he opens it and enters he will look upon
a dead face. The door was Lily's, and the face was the face of his dead
youth. Carelessness was over for Maurice, and irresponsibility. And
hope, too, he thought, and enthusiasm, and ambition. All over! All dead.
All lying stiff and still on the other side of a shiny golden-oak door,
with its half window hung with a Nottingham lace curtain. When he
started up the three flights of stairs to that litt