Hill. School food is always horrid."

"But won't Eleanor's dullness afflict Buster?" he said, doubtfully;
then--because at that moment Edith banged into the room to show her
shuddering mother a garter snake she had captured--he added, with
complacent subtlety, "as for food, I, personally, prefer a dinner of
herbs with an _interesting_ woman, than a stalled ox and Eleanor."

Which caused Edith to say, "Is Eleanor uninteresting, father?"

"Good heavens, no!" said Mr. Houghton, with an alarmed look; "_of
course_ she isn't! What put such an idea into your head?" And as Buster
and her squirming prize departed, he told his Mary that her daughter was
destroying his nervous system. "She'll repeat that to Eleanor," he
groaned.

His wife had no sympathy for him; "You deserve anything you may get!"
she said, severely; and proceeded to write to Eleanor to make her
proposition. If they cared to take Edith, she said, they could hire a
house and stop boarding--"which is dreadful for both of your digestions;
and I will be glad if this plan appeals to you, to feel that Edith is
with anyone who has such gentle manners as you."

Eleanor, reading the friendly words at the boarding-house breakfast
table, said quickly to herself, "I don't want her... She would
monopolize Maurice!" Then she hesitated; "He would be more comfortable
in a house of his own... But Edith? Oh, I _don't_ want her!"

She turned to show the letter to Maurice, but he was sitting sidewise,
one arm over the back of his chair, in vociferous discussion with a
fellow boarder. "No, sir!" he was declaring; "if they revise the rules
again, they'll revise the guts out of the whole blessed game; they'll
make it all muscle and no mind."

"But football isn't any intellectual stunt," the other boarder insisted.

"It _is_--to a degree. The old flying wedge--"

"Maurice!" Eleanor said again; but Maurice, impassioned about "rules,"
didn't even hear her. She gave his arm a little friendly shake.
"Maurice! You are the limit, with your old football!"

He turned, laughing, and took the letter from her hand. As he read it,
his face changed sharply. "But Fern Hill is in Medfield!" he exclaimed.

"I suppose she could take the trolley almost to the school grounds,"
Eleanor conceded, reluctantly.

"Why can't she live out there? It's a boarding school, isn't it?" (She
might meet Lily on the car!)

For a moment she accepted his decision with relief; then the thought of
his comfort