ou who maybe could tell you--the doctor. He
took care of her baby. Doctor Nelson--"

"Nelson!"

"He's the hospital doctor now. Why don't you ask him?"

"Thank you," said Eleanor vaguely. She rose, saying she felt better and
was much obliged. Then she went out on to the porch, and down the broken
steps to the windy scorching street.

She was certain: Maurice had gone to Medfield to see Mrs. Dale...

_Why?_

She was quite calm, so calm that she found herself thinking that she had
forgotten to get an yeast cake for Mary. "I'll get it as I go home," she
thought. But as she stood waiting for the car it occurred to her that
she had better think things out before she went home. Better not see
Maurice until she had decided just how she should tell him that there
was no use having secrets from her! That she _knew_ he was seeing Mrs.
Dale! Then he would have to tell her _why_ he was seeing her... There
could be only one reason... For a moment she was suffocated by that
"reason"! She let the returning car pass, and signaled the one going out
into the country; she would go, she told herself, to the end of the
route, and by that time she would know what to do. The car was crowded,
but a kindly faced young woman rose and offered her a seat. Eleanor
declined it, although her knees were trembling.

"Oh, do take it!" the woman urged, pleasantly, and Eleanor could not
resist sinking into it.

"You are very kind," she said, smiling faintly.

The woman smiled, too, and said, "Well, I always think what I'd like
anyone to do for my mother, if _she_ couldn't get a seat in a car! I
guess you're about her age."

Eleanor hardly heard her; she sat staring out of the window--staring at
that same landscape on which she and Maurice had gazed in the unseeing
ecstasy of their fifty-four minutes of married life! "He said we would
come back in fifty years--not by ourselves." As she said that, a thought
stabbed her! _There was a child that day, in the yard!_

When she saw that the car was approaching the end of the route, she
thought of the locust tree, and the blossoming grass, and the whispering
river. "I'll go there, and think," she said.

"All out!" said the conductor; and she rose and walked, stumbling once
or twice, and with one hand outstretched, as if--in the dazzling July
day--she had to feel her way in an enveloping darkness. She went down
the country road, where the bordering weeds were white with dust, toward
that field of youn