,
"Hello!" and Maurice said, "Hello!" and added that it was a cold day.
The fact that Maurice said not a word about that recovering little
patient in Medfield made the doctor's mind revert to the possibilities
he had recognized in Lily's entry.

"Yet he looks too decent for that sort of thing," the doctor thought;
"well, it's a rum world." Then Maurice took his turn at the window, and
Doctor Nelson put his notes in his pocket, and the two men nodded to
each other, and said, "By," and went their separate ways.

CHAPTER XIV

Edith's first winter in Mercer went pretty well; she was not fussy about
what she had to eat; "I can always stoke on bread and butter," she said,
cheerfully; and she was patient with the aging Bingo's yapping
jealousies; "The smaller a dog is, the more jealous he is!" she said,
with good-humored contempt; and she didn't mind Eleanor's
speechlessness. "_I_ talk!" Edith said. But Maurice?... "I love him next
to father and mother," Edith thought; but, all the same, she didn't know
what to make of Maurice! He had very little to say to her--which made
her feel annoyingly young, and made him seem so old and stern that
sometimes she could hardly realize that he was the Maurice of the
henhouse, and the camp, and the squabbles. Instead, he was the Maurice
of that night on the river, the "Sir Walter Raleigh" Maurice! Once in a
while she was quite shy with him. "He's awfully handsome," she thought,
and her eyes dreamed. "What a clod Johnny is, compared to him!" ... As
for Eleanor, Edith, being as unobservant as most sixteen-year-old girls,
saw only the lovely dark eyes and the beautiful brow under the ripple of
soft black hair, Eleanor's sterile silences did not trouble her, and she
never knew that the traces of tears meant a helpless consciousness that
dinner had been a failure. The fact was, she never noticed Eleanor's
looks! She merely thought Maurice's wife was old, and didn't "get much
fun out of life--she just plays on the piano!" Edith thought. Pain of
mind or body was, to Edith--as probably it ought to be to
Youth--unintelligible; so she had no sympathy. In fact, being sixteen,
she had still the hard heart of a child.

It may have been the remembrance of Sir Walter Raleigh that made her,
one night, burst into reminiscent questions:

"Maurice! Do you remember the time that boat upset, and that girl--all
painted, you know--flopped around in the water?"

Maurice said, briefly, why, yes; he be