e fear of
Youth_! She moved Bingo gently, stroking him until he seemed to be
asleep; then sat up, and put her feet on the floor. The folded
handkerchief slipped from her forehead, and she pressed her hands
against her temples. "I'm going downstairs," she said to herself; "I
won't be left out!" She felt a sick qualm as she got on to her feet, and
went over to look at herself in the mirror ... her face was pale, and
her hair, wet with cologne, was pasted down in straggling locks on her
forehead; she tried to smooth it. "Oh, I look old enough to be--his
aunt," she said, hopelessly. When she opened her door she heard a little
thud behind her; it was Bingo, scrambling off the bed to follow her; as
she went downstairs, unsteadily, and clinging to the banisters, he
stepped on her skirt, so she had to stoop and pick him up. At the closed
kitchen door she paused for a moment, leaning against the wall; her head
swam. Bingo, held in one trembling arm, put out his little pink tongue
and licked her cheek. "I _won't_ be left out," she said again. Just as
her hand touched the knob there was an outburst of joyous yells, and a
_whack_! as a lump of taffy, flung by one of the roisterers, hit the
resounding panel of the door--then Mrs. Newbolt's fat chuckle, and
Johnny's voice vociferating that Edith was the limit, and
Maurice--"Edith, if you put that stuff in my hair, I'll skin you alive!"

"Boil her in oil!" yelled Johnny.

Eleanor turned around and crept back to the stairs; she caught at the
newel post, and stood, gasping; then, somehow, she climbed up to her
room. There, lifting Bingo into his basket, she sank on her bed, groping
blindly for the damp handkerchief to put across her forehead. "Mary will
give notice," she said. After a while, as the throbbing grew less acute,
she said, "He's their age." Bingo, crawling out of his basket, scrabbled
up on to the bed; she felt his little loving cold nose against her face.

CHAPTER XVI

"What a kid Johnny Bennett is!" Maurice told Eleanor. He was detailing to
her, while he was scrubbing the stickiness of the kitchen festivities
off his hands, what had happened downstairs. "But do you know, I believe
he's soft on Edith! How old is he?"

"He's nearly nineteen. Children, both of them."

"Nineteen?" Maurice said, astounded. Nineteen! Johnny? "Why, _I_ was
nineteen, when--" He paused. She was silent. Suddenly Maurice felt
_pity_. He had run the gamut of many emotions in the last fou