inst a wintry sky. A little path, with moss
between the bricks and always damp in the shadow of the poplar, led from
the basement door to an iron gate; through its rusty bars one could see,
a block away, the slipping gleam of the river, hurrying down from "their
meadow," to disappear under the bridge. Maurice said he would build a
seat around the poplar, "... and we'll put a table under it, and paint
it green, and have tea there in the afternoon! Skeezics will like that."

"Edith looks healthy," said Mrs. Newbolt; "my dear father used to say he
liked healthy females. Old-fashioned word--females. Well, I'm afraid
dear father liked 'em too much. But my dear mother--she was a
Dennison--pretended not to see it. She had sense. Great thing in married
life, to have sense, and know what not to see! Pity Edith's not musical.
Have you a cook? I believe she'd have caught you, Maurice, if Eleanor
hadn't got in ahead! I brought a chocolate drop for Bingo. Here, Bingo!"

Bingo, silky and snarly, climbed on to her steeply sloping black-satin
lap, ate the chocolate drop--keeping all the while a liquid and adoring
eye upon his mistress--then slid down and ran to curl up on Eleanor's
skirt.

By September the moving and seat building were accomplished--the last
not entirely on Edith's account; it was part of Maurice's painstaking
desire to do something--anything!--for "poor Eleanor," as he named her
in his remorseful thought. There was never a day--indeed, there was not
often an hour!--when his own meanness to his wife (combined with disgust
at being a liar) did not ache somewhere in the back of his mind. So he
tried, in all sorts of anxious ways, to please her. He almost never saw
Lily; but the thought of her often brought Eleanor a box of candy or a
bunch of violets. Such expenditures were slightly easier for him now,
because he had had another small raise,--which this time he had told
Eleanor about. On the strength of it he said to himself that he supposed
he ought to give Lily a little something extra? So on the day when Mrs.
Houghton and Edith were to arrive in Mercer, he went out to Medfield to
tell Jacky's mother that she might count on a few dollars more each
month. The last time he had seen her, Lily had told him that Jacky "was
fussing with his teeth something fierce. I had to hire a little girl
from across the street," she said, "to take him out in the perambulator,
or else I couldn't 'tend to my cooking. It costs money to liv