t him! "He would never forgive me if he knew I had thought of
such a thing, He must never know it."

In the comfort of her own remorse, and the reassurance of his half
frankness, she walked back to the station and waited, in the midday
heat, for the returning car. Her head had begun to ache, but she said to
herself that she must not disappoint little Donny. So she went, in the
blazing sun, to the old washerwoman's house, climbed three flights of
stairs, and found the boy in bed, flushed with worry for fear "Miss
Eleanor" wasn't coming. She took the little feeble body in her arms,
and sat down in the steamy kitchen by an open window, where Donny could
see, on the clothes lines that stretched like gigantic spiderwebs across
a narrow courtyard, shirts and drawers, flapping and kicking and
bellying in the high, hot wind. She talked to him, and said that if his
grandmother would hire a piano, she would give him music lessons;--and
all the while her sore mind was wondering how old the mother of that
woman in the car was? Then she sang to Donny--little merry, silly songs
that made him smile:

"The King of France,
And forty thousand men,
Marched up a hill--"

She stopped short; Edith had thrown "The King of France" at her, that
day of the picnic, when she had cringed away from the water and the
slimy stones, and climbed up on the bank where she had been told to
"guard the girl's shoes and stockings"! "Oh, I'll be so glad to get her
and her 'brains' out of the house!" Eleanor thought. But her voice,
lovely still, though fraying with the years--went on:

"Marched up a hill--
_And
then
marched
down
again_!"

When, with a splitting headache, she toiled home through the heat, she
said to herself: "He ought to have been frank, and told me the woman was
Mrs. Dale; I wouldn't have minded, for I know such a person couldn't
have interested him. She had no figure, and she looked stupid. He
couldn't have said _she_ had 'brains'! That girl in the car was
impertinent."

CHAPTER XXI

The heat and the wind--and remorse--gave Eleanor such a prolonged
headache that Maurice, in real anxiety and without consulting her--wrote
to Mrs. Houghton that "Nelly was awfully used up by the hot weather,"
and might he bring her to Green Hill now, instead of later? Her prompt
and friendly telegram, "_Come at once_," made him tell his wife that he
was going to pack her off to the mountains, _quick_!

She began to say