whole affair and see what must be done. But there
was nothing to be done. Up in his room in the hotel he and Maurice
thrashed it all out:

"She prefers to stay in Mercer," Maurice explained; "and she'll stay.
There's nothing I can do; absolutely nothing! But she'll play fair. I'm
not afraid of Lily."

If Mr. Houghton wished, uneasily, that his ward was afraid of Lily, he
did not say so. He only told Maurice again that he was "betting on him."

"You won't lose," Maurice said, laconically.

"Perhaps," Henry Houghton said, doubtfully, "I ought to say that Mrs.
Houghton--who is the wisest woman I know, as well as the best--has an
idea that in matters of this sort, frankness is the best course. But in
your case (of which, of course, she knows nothing) I don't agree with
her."

"It would be impossible," Maurice said, briefly. And his guardian, whose
belief in secrecy had been shaken, momentarily, by his Mary's opinion,
felt that, so long as he had quoted her, his conscience was clear. So he
only told the boy again he was _sure_ he could bet on him! And because
shame, and those bleak words "my own fault," kept the spiritual part of
Maurice alive,--(and because Lily was a white blackbird!) the bet stood.

But he made no promises about the future. However much of a liar
Maurice was going to be, to Eleanor, he would not, he told himself, lie
to this old friend by saying he would never see Lily again. The truth
was, some inarticulate moral instinct made him know that there would
come a time when he would _have_ to see her... During all that winter,
when he sat, night after night, at Miss Ladd's dinner table, and Eleanor
fended off Miss Moore and the widow, or when, in those long evenings in
their own room they played solitaire, he was thinking of Lily, thinking
of that inner summons to what he called "decency," which would, he knew,
drive him--in three months--in two months--in one month!--to Lily's
door. By and by it was three weeks--two weeks--one week! Then came days
when he said, in terror, "I'll go to-morrow." And again: "To-morrow, I
_must_ go. Damn it! I must!" So at last, he went, lashed and driven by
that mastering "decency"!

He had bought a box of roses, and, looping two fingers through
its strings, he walked twice around the block past the ugly apartment
house before he could make up his mind to enter. He wondered whether
Lily had died? Women do die, sometimes. "Of course I don't want anything
to happen to her