odgers--and it was not easy to get
them!--so that she could be at home and look after the baby.

Maurice aged ten years in that first winter of rigid and unexplainable
penuriousness, and of a secrecy which meant perilous skirtings of
downright lying; for Eleanor occasionally asked why they had so little
money to spend? He had requested a raise--and not mentioned to Eleanor
the fact that he had got it. When she complained because his salary was
so low, he told her Weston was paying him all he was worth, and he
_wouldn't_ strike for more! "So it's impossible to go to housekeeping,"
he said--for of course she continued to urge housekeeping, saying that
she couldn't understand why they had to be so economical! But he
refused, patiently. To be patient, Maurice did not need, now, to remind
himself of the mountain and her faithfulness to him; he had only to
remind himself of the yellow-brick apartment house, and his
faithlessness to her. "I've got to be kind, or I'd be a skunk," he used
to think. So he was very kind. He did not burst out at her with
irritated mortification when she telephoned to the office to know if
"Mr. Curtis's headache was better";--he had suffered so much that he had
gone beyond the self-consciousness of mortification;--and he walked with
her in the park on Sunday afternoons to exercise Bingo; and on their
anniversary he sat beside her in the grass, under the locust tree, and
watched the river--their river, which had brought Lily into his
life!--and listened to the lovely voice:

"O thou with dewy locks who lookest down!"

CHAPTER XIII

The next fall, however, the boarding did come to an end, and they went
to housekeeping. It was Mrs. Houghton who brought this about. Edith was
to enter Fern Hill School in the fall, and her mother had an
inspiration: "Let her board with Eleanor and Maurice! The trolley goes
right out to Medfield, and it will be very convenient for her. Also, it
will help them with expenses," Mrs. Houghton said, comfortably.

"But why can't she live at the school?" Edith's father objected, with a
troubled look; somehow, he did not like the idea of his girl in that
pathetic household, which was at once so conscious and so unconscious of
its own instability! "Why does she have to be with Eleanor and Maurice?"
Henry Houghton said.

"Eleanor has the refinement that a hobbledehoy like Edith needs," Mrs.
Houghton explained; "and I think the child will have better food than at
Fern