ase him; he didn't love her, but tried to be polite; he was not often
angry with her, he wasn't fond enough of her to be angry! So, forgetful
of that security of the Stars--Truth!--to which he had once aspired, he
grew dully used to the arid safety of untruth,--though sometimes he
swore softly to himself at the tiresome irony of the office nickname
which, with an occasional gilt hatchet, still persisted. He would
remember that evening of panic at the Mortons', and think, lazily, "She
can't possibly get on Lily's track!" So Lily lived in anxious
thriftiness at 16 Maple Street; and Maurice, no longer acutely afraid of
her, and only seeing her two or three times a year, was more or less
able to forget her, in his growing pleasure in Edith's presence in his
house--a pleasure quite obvious to Eleanor.

As for Edith, she used to wonder, sometimes, why Eleanor was so "up
stage"? (that was her latest slang); but it did not trouble her much,
for she was too generous to put two and two together. "Eleanor has
nervous prostration," she used to tell herself, with good-natured excuse
for some especial coldness; and she even tried, once in a while, "to
make things pleasant for poor old Eleanor!" "I lug her in," she told
Johnny.

"She's a dose," said Johnny.

"Yes," Edith agreed; "she's stupid. But I'm going to pull off a picnic,
some Sunday, to cheer her up. 'Course you needn't come, if you don't
want to."

Johnny, looking properly bored, said, briefly, "I don't mind."

This was in mid-September. "Are you game for it, Eleanor?" Edith said
one night at dinner; "we can find some pleasant place by the river--"

"I know a bully place," Maurice said, "in the Medfield meadows;
remember, Eleanor? We went there on our trolley wedding trip," he
informed Edith.

Eleanor, struggling between the pleasure of Maurice's "remember," and
antagonism at sharing that sacred remembering with Edith, objected; "It
may rain."

"Oh, come on," Edith rallied her: "be a sport! It won't kill you if it
does rain!"

But Maurice, after his impulsive recollection of the "bully place,"
remembered that the trolley car which would take them out to the river,
must pass Lily's door; "I hope it will rain," he thought, uneasily.

However, on that serene September Sunday a week later, it didn't rain;
and Maurice fell into the spirit of Edith's plans; for, after all, even
if the car did pass Lily's ugly little house, it wouldn't mean anything
to anybody! "I'll si