r
years--love, and fright, and repentance, and agonies of shame, and
sometimes anger; but he had never touched pity. It stabbed him now, and
its dagger blade was sawtoothed with remorse. He looked at his wife,
lying there with closed eyes, her pillow damp where the wet handkerchief
had slipped from her temples, and her beautiful mouth sagging with pain.
"Oh, I must be nice to her, poor thing!" he thought. Aloud he said,
"Poor Eleanor!"

Instantly her dark eyes opened in startled joy; his tenderness lifted
her into indifference to that throbbing in her temples. "I don't mind
anything," she said, "if you love me."

"Can't I do something for your head?"

"Just kiss me, darling," she said.

He kissed her, for he was sorry for her. But he was thinking of himself.
"I was Johnny Bennett's age, when ... And I _wanted_ to kiss her! My
God! I may have to keep up this kissing business for--for forty years!"
And whenever he was kissing her, he would have to think how he was
deceiving her; he would have to think of Lily. Yes; he had been a "kid,"
like Johnny! How _could_ she have done it! Pity sharpened into anger:
How could she have taken advantage of a boy? Well; he had had his
fling. To be sure, he was paying for it now, not only in anxiety about
money, but in shame, and furtiveness, and the corroding consciousness of
being a liar, and in the complete shipwreck of every purpose and
ambition that a young man ought to have. "And that day, in the field, I
called it _love_!" He would have been amused at the cynical memory, if
he had not been so bitter. "Love? Rot! Still, I ought to be kinder to
her;--but I can't bear to look at her. She's an old woman."

Eleanor put out her hot, trembling hand and groped for his. "Good night,
darling," she said; "my head's better."

"So glad," he said.

The next morning, as Eleanor, rather white and shaky, was dressing, she
said, "Edith doesn't seem to realize that she is too old to be so free
and easy with Johnny Bennett--and you."

"She's getting mighty good looking," Maurice said.

"She has too much color," Eleanor said, quickly.

Maurice was right. During Edith's second winter in Mercer she grew
prettier all the time; poor, speechless Johnny, looking at her through
his spectacles, was quite miserable. He told some of his intimate
friends that life was a bad joke.

"I shall never marry; just do some big work, and then get out. There is
nothing really worth while. Mere looks in a woma